2025 Movies & TV Stack Exchange Moderator Election Chat

The election ends tomorrow and whatever the result I want to thank everyone who put themsevles forward. It is no small amount of work to answer the questions and it is a responsibility that people are signing up for. I would honestly be happy with any of the candidates winning and I hope the losers are not discouraged from putting themselves forward the next time.

Maybe it was your scintillating presence that kept it from being a ghost town in the first place :-)

Vote for Skooba: More Responsible Parent than Steeler.

@galacticninja The election was not proposed by the moderators. We were approached and I thought it seemed like a good idea to allow it to go ahead. Question collection started 2 weeks ago. I agree its not a massive amount of time but it isn't a couple of days either.

@AJ (or other moderators) -- Not that it would effect my nomination decision, answers, or moderation philosophy... why are we having an election? Is it solely because Napoleon Wilson stepped down?

The good ones that got unjustly closed usually do. There was a spark of an interesting question in many of them. Just people stopped seeing that and trying to single-handedly fleshing out that spark wasn't going to work long-term anymore. That's afterall, why the close reason disappered anyway.

@galacticninja you keep repeating "only one moderator does the work" while spamming every post with comments asking for support on your meta posts, which naturally attracts flags from regular users. Being a moderator doesn’t mean one cannot express their thoughts, and I am simply doing so in a chat message. Yet, it seems like you believe ID Trivia post handling is the only real work and that only one moderator counts while disregarding others.

@galacticninja this is getting unnecessarily dragged out when your concern is singular, and there's some odd gaslighting happening. We're literally having an election to bring in fresh perspectives, yet you keep questioning why there's an election at all—despite expressing dissatisfaction with the current team and repeatedly fixating on the idea of just one mod, over and over again.

Suddenly I'm wishing the election had been called for 2 slots. There's so many good candidates now (ironically after the first week with only one candidate), and it's a shame that only one of them can win.

@V2Blast well, to bring that back on track: I voted!

Oh, yeah! @Catija Welcome back to the site! While I wouldn't have a problem with any of the candidates so far, I won't deny that it would be awesome to have you on the moderator team.

@steelersquirrel Does SE stand for Stack Exchange or Steelers Enthusiasts?

@Mast Nobody should have a problem with Skooba. He's well liked and respected in the SE community

Listen I think you both are selling yourselves short

@AnkitSharma Bazinga

I would like to express my...amusement that certain parts of the community tend to wonder in about every second meta comment why oh why we don't get new moderator elections while the existing moderators have all grown complacent in their lifetime position and have been in power for oh so long (not to speak of their obvious bias against the wishes of the community).

@Skooba-StandsAgainstAI I was curious about this too, so I made a meta post asking the same thing: 2025 Moderator Election – why are we having one now?. It’d be helpful to know if this is due to workload challenges with three mods or just about maintaining the usual number of moderators.

@galacticninja That's a backhanded congrats if I've ever seen one.

@Randal'Thor that's a disappointing result! I wanted last :(

Wow! Napoleon is on a roll this morning ;)

Covid changed things a lot

@NapoleonWilson Napoleon using a winkyface without a nose? Shocker ;-)

@AJ Several good answers have already been posted on the recently reopened "trivia" questions, in addition to the answers on the ID questions restored earlier in 2024. Not to mention, since we re-allowed ID questions, the number of daily questions has nearly tripled. That seems like a clear boost in engagement and activity to me. As for your question about improving question quality—seriously? I'm one of the most active editors, if not the most active, improving questions and answers.

It's the old quantity vs quality dichotomy. We need moar questions, moar clicks, moar traffic! We need AI to generate moar content so we get moar clicks and moar visits to our site! And everything else will sort itself out.

I really hope our newly elected moderator will be active and engaged. Right now, it seems like only one moderator is helping with the community effort to reopen questions closed under the retired "trivia" reason. If the new moderator isn’t around much, it won’t really benefit the community.

@steelersquirrel If even half of us moved to the main room after the election, there would be an active chat here too

Many of the questions in the questionaire are more broad strokes to gain an insight into the candidates' minds rather than pleas for specific actions, at least if it's not just "how you gonna help me undelete all the questions". ;-)

But users only complaining in the comments that the site is dead and nothing else might be a sign that noone is actually willing to do something about it and it might need someone to initiate something.

@Tinkeringbell Mods can be community leaders as well as just exception handlers. Maybe this is a bit of a beta-site viewpoint, where community is small and an important part of the mod role is to show leadership and help the site to grow, but M&TV seems to have shrunk over time (in terms of activity and content and community), so I'd hope to see mods leading activity-building exercises here too.

Apparently, it takes an election for chat to be active. TSR is a ghost town, but this chatroom is pretty active. SE loves a good election. lol

I remember a couple of users created account just to vote

You say that you were a moderator on “the Music stack” (presumably you mean MusicFans.SE, not Music.SE). You’re not a moderator there now, what happened?

I love that the mod election chat room has just become general life conversation :D

hah yeah, all kids are going to be the best there ever was after their first year of any sport

@steelersquirrel That seems fair, otherwise it would always be the same candidate at the top. If you refresh the page or come back to it after a while, you want to see the latest activity first, right?

Plus creeping up on @JohnP, but a Martial Arts mod probably isn't the sort of guy you want to creep up on unawares.

I forgot that Skoobs and I were married and had kids

@Tinkeringbell .... I agree, don't leave !

Can't get negative votes, just leave your nomination there.

If nobody has a problem with Skooba, there isn't necessarily a problem. Someone could put forward their name just to make it a race, but if they're no real competition Skooba can simply be appointed. It has been done before.

Maybe don't feature it in december, though. ;-)

To be honest, I was expecting quite a few nominations. The last election had 9 candidates (myself included). Granted, a lot can happen in 8 years...

How has your work load been since then? Has it been difficult with only 3 moderators and you need help, or is it just because the general threshold for moderators is 4?

Welcome all! This room is intended as a place to converse with candidates, discuss moderator traits, etc. For general discussion related to Movies & TV Stack Exchange, go here: The Screening Room

If you have questions about the election process itself, please ask your question on the Movies & TV Meta. Remember, folks stepping up to lead this community are committing a significant amount of their time, please keep all discourse civil and constructive.