Moderators (requests and notices)

Are we moving from a leadership model where responsibility was with the users to report infringements of a framework, decided by a benign leader and the users together, to a more dictatorial system?

No.

I don't want that and I don't think anyone else does either.

From a selfish point of view the whole act of moderating stuff creates work for me, and I'm all about reducing my workload. Thankfully I only do this moderating malarkey when stuff gets reported (in the last few days: edscoble and the cock stuff, saddle and the rape 'joke').

But it's pretty clear that by not being severe enough in how I moderate, and by consciously choosing to be so lenient (by ignoring many moderation requests, attempting to detect bias, letting small things go through, etc), that two things have happened: 1) I failed to listen to the feedback and act on it at the time, and 2) The total amount of moderation work created by a few people has gone up rather than down.

The end goal isn't to gleefully go on a banning spree. The end goal is to have achieved a net reduction in the amount of moderation work I have to do, and within that to have somehow got the tone of the forum back to where the vast majority want it to be.

What's become most clear to me recently (through things like looking at the nerg stats, and stats about users who have been reported frequently and who is reporting), is that a very large number of people report a very very small number of people, and the mass perspective is that the minority are responsible for the vast majority of issues on here, and those are the issues that then result in moderation.

It's not like I'm proposing the "no broken window" zero-tolerance stuff, more that being such a liberal about this and trying to be so accommodating also has it's own issues and perhaps the right balance is a few steps towards more actively moderating stuff when it happens rather than to let so much slide.