Rutab, only talking solves nothing. There needs to be action. There are matters we "discussed" and nothing has changed yet...
deletedover 10 years
One more quick thing about the lack of constructiveness in criticism, I don't really take anyone's criticism seriously unless it is constructive. If I see something like "FIX IT RUTAB YOU'RE SUCH A HORRIBLE MOD", I basically ignore it because if you don't care to tell me where I went wrong, I don't care enough to fix it.
All of your opinions matter a lot to us since we are moderators because of you guys. If there was no community, there would be no moderators. It is indeed a thankless job (except for those few people I've mentioned before) but I like doing it because it does better the community. Sorry for large wall of text.
TL;DR: Be constructive. Talk to us. We will attempt to do the same.
deletedover 10 years
In all seriousness, I'd like to point out that the common "it will never change because the staff and community are at a 'you vs. them' standpoint" is actually somewhat true. I'm not saying it's entirely the communities fault, because sometimes we too can be at fault (yes, hard to believe moderators aren't perfect!). The people that always make this job better are those who patiently work with us moderators to solve any issues they come across. Sadly, more and more users forget that they can patiently approach us with a concern and talk to us. It is automatically assumed that we're "corrupt" and "lousy at doing our jobs" when in reality we need more points of view from the community for which we are moderating. We're all still mods because we care about you guys whether you're nice to us or not. In the end we all want this site to flourish and to play some nice, fun mafia.
So what does all that come from? How in the world are we going to work together as a community to improve site-wide behavior and moderation? Constructive criticism. The only way to change something is by constructively telling us what we did wrong, how we did it wrong, and what we're supposed to do next time. Will you always be right? No. Will we always be right? Also no. That is why we talk through it calmly and constructively so that no one gets left behind in reasoning. We won't always agree and we won't always end it happily, but at least it'll be better than what it is now.
Although I doubt either of you aren't at least partly staying for the chance to be an admin eventually. Which I'm not saying is a bad thing, I would say these are all pretty common reasons, but most not that powerful motivators unless you are optimistic, and once things go wrong, mods always get tired and quit, myself included.
