Dear reader, as you might already be aware, there are "moderation tasks" that are executed on the Mathematics Stack Exchange(MSE) website by various users of varying reputation. In no particular order, these include editing of posts, reopening/closure of posts, (un)deletion of posts, tagging of posts, flagging and up/downvoting (I place this on the list although it's considered the weakest form). Roughly speaking, performing these tasks affect the nature of the website, in that they decide which questions on the website receive precedence over others, and to what extent. That way, the image of the website is moulded by its users.
It is already well known that MSE is a very transient space : there are many users, and yet very few of them participate regularly. Most users are generally "askers" : users that ask a question or two, and then are nowhere to be seen. Therefore, the majority of moderation is performed by users that are more than just visitors, and invest more than a mere token amount of effort in the workings of the website.
One of the biggest flaws of MSE is that, of these users spending a fair amount of time on the site, nearly everybody is either disproportionately reviewing questions, or is disproportionately answering questions. That is, the majority of these users either answer very, very few questions and perform a lot of stronger moderation tasks such as closure/reopening and deletion (and are generally referred to as curators) OR they answer far, far more questions than they perform stronger review tasks (and are generally referred to as answerers). The former are far fewer in number , while the latter are much larger in number. The latter have little to no participation on the meta website, while the former have a much larger presence, along with the moderators.
Let us not play the blame game and see who and what is responsible for this. The truth is that such levels of disproportionate participation actually hinders the development of the website. Let me explore some of the outcomes of this lop-sided behaviour of influential users :
A lack of communication : Even though channels of communication are open on both sides, a lack of time and desire means that these groups of users do not communicate with each other. Because their behaviours are generally confined to only one kind of contribution, they find it difficult to understand the other's mindset and attribute rational reasons for those practices which may or may not be accurate (Helping the people, helping the website etc.). At the same time, these users have the maximum impacts on the website's direction. Therefore, their efforts work contrary to each other on many occasions.
Inconsistent behaviour of the website : Inconsistent behaviour is the worst evil that can befall any community-driven website. Imagine that teacher who, when she enters the class, is either grumpy and ready to scold at the slightest mistake, or is so lenient that she's bought a box of chocolates to give the children and is ready to forgive those who haven't done their homework? If I were a student of that class, I simply would not know what to expect : and that's the case with questions that are of moderate-to-low quality on MSE. On the one hand, an answerer could get to your question first and answer it (sometimes very well, admittedly), or it could get closed and you'd have to edit it to reopen it. On the other hand, you could answer a question with the idea that it's good, and it could be closed the next minute even though it has a vote score of +5. Then, there will be people grumbling over it in the comments.
Unfair on new users : If we ourselves don't know what to expect when we perform our actions, how on actual Earth are we expecting new users to know what to do? If we need to embed them into our system, then they need to be told that certain NOs and certain YESs exist. Who is going to do that? Not enough people do, at the moment. Some say they exist, some say they don't. Even those that mean to reinforce behaviours via stronger moderation actions are not able to get their message across. At the end, the only thing we have done is given the new user an impression of "I don't know what to expect next!" and do you expect users to participate in such an atmosphere? Even regulars would have trouble participating in an inconsistent system.
Power Struggle : Given that the site is being pulled in orthogonal directions by very strong forces, either force believes that the only way they can mould the website is to merely show more "power" than the other website by performing more actions that increase their influence. That leads to a "power struggle", reducing the site to a political hotbed and less of a, well, mathematical website!
Thus, I believe that this game of extreme behaviours, however it came about , must reduce. I must give two examples of such behaviour that I found recently through SEDE queries. On the one hand, there is a user that has a reputation of ~200,000 and has posted over 10,000 answers. The same user has closed just 23 questions across a 10 year tenure, and is currently suspended for rule violations, having answered a large number of questions closed by other users. On the other hand, there is a user that went on a clean-up crusade, closing and deleting at the smallest whiff of a closable post. They had deleted a total of 4927 posts before they self-deleted their account (for anybody interested, these can be retrieved by SEDE, because one can retrieve posts by the users who deleted them). These behaviours came about because they refused to communicate (or did so with an air of self-righteousness) about the directions they wanted to take the website in, and took advantage of the disproportionate amounts of time at their disposal to push the website in orthogonal directions. Matters were eventually reconciled only by their absences.
I instead propose that influential users must practice holistic behaviour. Let me quickly explain what this means.
What are your thoughts when you visit a question on MSE? You're likely to define your role with respect to this question as one of the following :
Potential Answerer : You want to answer this question, or participate in the answering of the question by interacting with the questioner.
Questioner : You're the person who asked the question, and will attempt to see if anybody is asking for more information or has provided you content for perusal, be that an answer or a comment.
Curator : You want to see if the question is fit for the website or not(as written), and perform moderation actions as deemed fit by whatever direction you want to drive the website in.
Future Visitor : You came here looking for an answer to your question, and you want to know if this post answers your question or not.
Typically, the role of an "influential" user is confined to one of these four, and very few visitors to a post will think about how another person might view the post.
> A holistic user is one that, whenever they visit a question, take on all possible roles with respect to that question and perform moderation actions based on the sum total of merits and demerits that they see with respect to these roles.
That's being holistic : being able to view the same question from multiple viewpoints, leading to an informed and nuanced decision about the question. Most importantly, because one has made an effort to holistically think about a question, one may then own their opinion, and is ready to come out and defend it : thereby potentially exposing oneself to community scrutiny but being ready for a fair battle fought along reasoned lines.
Holistic participation, then, should entail some amount of reviewing for users that have enough reputation. The ability and courage to take stronger moderation actions following informed decision making is desirable, and is the best way in which one can influence the proceedings of the website more effectively.
Here are some benefits of holistic behaviour that I can see right from the off.
Better ownership of the community : By being holistic, one automatically holds oneself more responsible for the site's functioning than the default user. Debates fought by users that have strived to hold holistic viewpoints, while they may have dead-ends and the occasional spill-overs into nastiness, usually end up being more informative to the average audience and provide for a wealth of new viewpoints for the community to consider. This way, users will own their opinion, and their impact on the website, rather than neglect it and ask others to do their bit.
Easier to prevent standoffs : It is obvious that it takes longer for unreasonable forces to reach a compromise (and there's a lot more bloodshed in there) than it takes for reasonable forces to reach one. Holistic users, having seen and heard each other's viewpoints, eventually come to respect the opposite viewpoint and not discard it and make enemies of those holding it. That just makes it easier to come to a consensus on pretty much anything : simply because people are a lot more accommodating.
A consistent image and experience for new users : In a system functioning consistently, new users come in knowing what to expect : or find out very quickly what to expect. Yes, the odd one that goes out disappointed will talk about it, but the ones that stay on buy into the consistent ethos of the system, and eventually buy into thinking holistically, being the caregivers for the next set of new users.
Perhaps we overestimate the scale of our site. We don't have plenty of questions coming in as yet! Really, we don't. It's about 500 questions a day, roughly (this may change with the season). It would probably take about 1000 users, each investing about 10 minutes in holistic behaviour (yes, that's all I believe it would account for) a day, for this problem to be alleviated.
Most importantly, being a holistic user isn't really a goal : it's a process like research that is honed by constantly being in everybody's shoes and thinking like a true community citizen, rather than one who wishes to fix their role on site and nail their colours to a mast.
Furthermore, the process positively gets easier with experience, like an actor who finds it very easy to transition from villain to hero in different movies because of his or her familiarity with their craft. Eventually, one does not find it difficult to appreciate many viewpoints and can easily mediate and propose decisions on behalf of various parties.
No one is perfect or better than anyone else at holistic behaviour, frankly. All one can do is better oneself by the day. Like teaching, the eventual route is beset with mistakes, failures to think or the inability to reason from various viewpoints. However, we must be quick to forgive ourselves : it is also likely that our wayward actions will be undone by another user acting in good faith, thereby annealing their defects. That's what happens when everybody attempts to think like everybody else.
In conclusion, I believe that the majority of our influential users are not acting holistically. Whatever it takes, holistic action is the key step in retaining the spirit and effect of community moderation. Failing this, such users are doing nothing but playing games with each other : unknowingly, and to devastating effect on other users of this website. Changes in attitude and behaviour are imperative on both sides. I sincerely hope that by doing the small things individually, we can achieve big things as a collective.