Comment by DrewADesign
1 day ago
Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me.
I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.
> Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective.
If your lack of interest in how the existing community works is that profound, then you could hardly be said to have a good-faith interest in joining the community in the first place. Which means you're actually upset that the site doesn't provide the service you expected it to.
Sites are not required to provide services simply because the people who arrive there believe that's the service the site provides.
If you're sticking around to keep answering questions, and it's because you think the place has a cool concept behind it and you want to become part of something, you owe it to yourself to make sure you understand what the "something" is. And you owe it to the other people there to accept that you are only one voice out of N in deciding that.
> and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose
That is emphatically not what the purpose was. See for example https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 .
The point system was a broken mess. But it was not intended to represent what you appear to mean by "expertise"; it was intended to represent trust and engagement.
By answering questions, you obtained reputation which granted you privileges, which you were expected to use to maintain the site according to the site's objectives. This includes, notably, filtering questions according to what helps build the site as a useful reference for users of search engines, which is the real motivating force behind the standard question-closure reasons (even if it took a while to achieve consensus on that, and to decide how to phrase it all). And to refrain from answering questions which should be closed, because that acts counter to the site's objective.
The design was specifically intended to ensure that you get scrutinized by peers or superiors — in the domain of using the site properly and working towards its goal, not in the domain of the subject matter where you have expertise. I agree that the reputation system utterly failed in effecting this.
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