Monica

Today SE posted Our Theory of Moderation, Re-visited, which starts by saying SE's moderators are amazing people and gives us a lot of credit for shaping what good moderation looks like. It goes on to lay out some principles for SE to follow:

As we continue to grow – Can you believe we’re ten? – one of our most important responsibilities is to support our moderators, and allow them to continue to train the new generations of mods who join the ranks each year. Here’s how we think about our obligations to the hundreds of incredible people elected by our community:

Trust. Support. Agency. Accountability. Autonomy.

1. Trust people. Nothing else works if you don’t have trust. You can’t grant autonomy if you don’t trust folks, and they won’t be accountable if they don’t trust you.

2. Supporting people should be your default reaction. This is essential to maintaining trust. We haven’t always held this ideal as highly as we should, but we’re focused on doing a better job going forward. Sometimes supporting people means teaching them what they didn’t see, or how they could have explained their position better. What matters is, when you show up, their default reaction is phew, things just got better.

3. Give people as much agency as you can. The people closest to the issues tend to be the ones that are best suited to make the best decisions.

4. Require accountability as a tool for success. When you think of accountability, you might think of blame, and that means you’re probably a victim of bad management. Positive accountability means you’ve created a space where trust, support and agency run freely and people understand what’s their role is, and what success looks like. This means teaching people to learn to embrace mistakes as an opportunity for growth and improvement.

5. Autonomy is critical to a sense of ownership. Folks need high-level direction in order to thrive, but even more essential is the space to interpret goals and distill them out into a strategy that they can act on in their own very unique circumstances. Some people need more help than others, but not getting in someone’s way while serving as a guard rail and a mentor can be really, really, really hard.

Have you seen us run afoul of these principles? Sure, you have – plenty of times. But we work at them, and we’re writing ’em down, to make sure these five points remain a core and active part of our commitment to our moderators going forward.

This is all good, important stuff. It's good to see SE taking seriously their obligations to their moderators.

It still feels like they've left unaddressed these recent events and many of the issues I and others brought up. So I'm not sure how to feel about this as a resolution.