Somehow I missed that this was already posted: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/57640027#57640027

Interestingly, this room became more active after the election finished than during the election.

I guess during the election there wasn't so much to discuss

In particular during the literal election period where no candidates could join or leave, and no one wanted to argue for their favored candidate (probably because it would involve arguing against another good candidate, which would be somewhat uncomfortalbe)

@WillSawin I see it completely differently.

Can you elaborate?

If users some site (for example MO) actually care about the way the site is moderated, they should try to know as much as they can about the candidates before they decide who to vote for.

I concur. I just observe that people didn't seem to want to discuss this.

For example, there were candidates without almost no activity on meta, in review queues, editing, etc. That naturally raises the question whether they know enough about how the site works and what they would do as moderators. I did not see many comments asking about this.

Maybe people didn't seem to want to discuss this can be interpreted as MO users do not care that much about the site?

Of course, I have mostly experience with Mathematics, there are many users on that site who do care about it. So for MO it is difficult to look good in the comparison.

Anyway, the fact is that only very few of the candidates actually visited this chatroom - so it wasn't possible to have discussion with them here in chat.

@MartinSleziak And the comments asking about it tended to get the person asking... uh... kinda a rude response...

Looking at the list of pingable users I see Asaf Karagila, Stefan Kohl, Tim Campion, Alec Rhea. Did I miss somebody?

I do not want to defend the choice not to discuss this, but I think "MO users do not care that much about the site" is not a reasonable inference to draw from this.

In fact, I think many MO users probably care about the quality of the site too much, in some sense.

The claim that "MO users do not care" is not made just based on this, but also based on other things I have seen on the site.

It is certainly possible that there are people that do care, but do not have time to do something useful for the site.

I should clarify that MO would be useful even if half of the posts were spam, the site would be virtually unsearchable, and it would be using ascii rather than MathJax. The quality content probably outweighs what I wrote here.

And MO certainly is not in the state I described above. (That was clearly an exaggeration.) But it is not good to go in that direction.

Do you think MO has so much high quality content by accident?

@WillSawin It is difficult to say what is meant by the words "by accident".

On the other hand, it might be a good thing if mods are less active. They are less likely to burn out. (Again, comparing with Mathematics, where many moderators stepped down over the time.)

I think that many MO users care about the quality of MO and try to improve it by the method of posting good questions and answers.

Many users on MO are certainly posting questions and answers.

What I see less on MO (compared to Mathematics) is retagging, correcting dead links, correcting typos, involvement on meta, etc.

Sorry if I'm being too harsh on MO. (These are just my personal opinions, it is quite possible that other user see it differently.)

I'll have some teaching a bit later and I want to prepare a bit before that, so I should probably leave.

In any case, thanks for your comments here. And have a nice day!

Congrats to our new moderators: @Asaf, @Stefan, and @Tim.

@WillSawin Out of curiosity, when you said that "many MO users probably care about the quality of the site too much, in some sense", what did you mean by that?

Did you mean that, because their care too much, they are doing things which are to the detriment of the site? Or that they are doing things that might cause problems for them?

It goes without saying, if you're busy, feel free to ignore my question. Just because the phrase "too much, in some sense" seemed a bit intriguin, I could not resist asking.

A slight weirdness in the numbers - on the election page it says "806 users voted", but on OpaVote it says "794 ballots" (and "0 empty ballots"). Anybody knows how that comes about?

@DamienC Thank you very much!

@gmvh To add yet another number -- the number of Constituent badges awarded for this election appears to be 797.

I think "quality of the site" is too broad a concept. I think many users care about the quality of the content. Fewer users care about the quality and details of the processes.

These two are not entirely independent but rather orthogonal.

I suspect the differences in the numbers might be partly explained by people voting and then removing all their votes.

Maybe the difference with the number of Constituent badges is due to people removing their votes before the badges script ran?

Anyway, it would be nice to know the actual reasons.

Yes. I was slightly worried for a second when I ran the results last night. And then @Tim came up with that recount joke... :-)

So it would definitely be worth learning more about that discrepancy.

To add to the speculation, I think "0 empty ballots" sounds a little funny. I'd have thought there'd be at least one person who started to vote, then decided for whatever reason that they didn't want to, and cleared off their ballot. I wonder if SE somehow just didn't send the empty ballots to OpaVote, but did count them toward the "Constituent" badge.

@DamienC Thanks!

@TimCampion That tracks, since badges are hardly ever "taken away" (with tag badges being the exception).

That still leaves the 9 users who voted, but didn't receive the the Constituent badge.

@gmvh Possibly deleted users? I don't know how SE deals with user deletions and voting.

I suppose we'll have to wait for clarification from @Catija, then.

@TimCampion IF there are no votes indicated, we don't send anything. Starting a vote doesn't make a "ballot". There's no such thing as an empty ballot. :)

So, it's likely that 9 people clicked some voting buttons to get the badge and then cleared their ballot, thus removing it.

@Catija Okay, that sounds like what I was speculating at. Opavote seems to explicitly allow for empty ballots (at least in that the election report they generate includes a count of empty ballots), but y'all are filtering them out before sending them over. Since the "Constituent" badge seems to be awarded even for an empty ballot, it seems to me like it would be most consistent if you did send the empty ballots to Opavote -- then in theory these numbers would match. But it seems a minor issue.

I suspect not many people clicked the buttons just to get a badge

9, apparently :P

I suspect it more has to do with curiosity about the voting mechanisms

Maybe 9 people decided "eh, this looks to complicated for me" or decided "oh no, I don't feel ready to properly evaluate all the candidates before voting" or things like that.

Again, not a big deal when we're talking about 9 people out of hundreds

OpaVote is designed to allow people to vote on their site, so you can email people a ballot and they can visit OpaVote to participate - and empty ballot would indicate a person who didn't vote but who was issued a ballot - for us, that'd actually be 10915 - 806 = 10109 empty ballots.

ah interesting!

Yeah, I suppose it would be misleading to report that as the total number of voters.

Even if you only included people who visited the election page, it'd be just under 1000.

The above reminded me of this post on Meta Stack Exchange: Which moderator election was decided with the smallest margin?

(1752 - 806 = 946)

@MartinSleziak Thanks also for your time in responding to me! I think some users have a misguided idea of how to improve the quality of the site that leads them to cause harm - specifically, that the main way is to close low-quality questions or stop people from asking them, which leads to being rude to new users (or othees) asking reasonable questions, which leads to people being afraid to start using the site.

@WillSawin I can understand that sometimes close voters can be a bit harsh. On the other hand, MO community probably wants to keep only the questions that are on-topic. (For example, MO is not intended for homework from introductory calculus course.)

Some stats from SEDE: Top close voters and Top close voters in 2021.

There are also some stats in the review queue - but that is a bit different. (It is the number of reviews. Moreover, it is possible to vote to close outside the review - such close voters are not counted here.)

@MartinSleziak Sure. Let me return to something closer to the original topic and say that efforts to improve the quality of the site should be based on thinking about what the largest problems on the site are.

I don't think typos, dead links, or poorly-tagged questions are big problems on MO, so I'm not very disappointed that people aren't putting much effort into fixing them. I do think poor behavior to new users is a big problem on the site, and for that reason I have done a little bit to try to fix it.

You probably mean your post on meta about this topic: Should we exercise a bit more tolerance towards newcomers?

From some viewpoints, if MathOverflow were a bit more similar to Mathematics (not in content, but in the way the site is run), I would consider that a positive development.

As far as new users goes, one advantage Mathematics has that the information for the first-time askers is customized. So the new users get some information about the site already before asking.

@MartinSleziak My thinking on this issue has evolved a bit since then. Yes, I agree that the information for first-time users should be customized. (I upvoted your meta post when it was first posted, and I participated in a separate discussion along similar lines.) Perhaps this could be something for the new moderators to work on when they get up to speed?

Well, I considered this already a lost cause, but we'll see.

At the time, there were no suggestions from MO users for the text in the modal window.

Certainly, the suggestion what the text should look like is needed before the mods can request the change from the Stack Exchange staff.

Since the question is old, I doubt it gets much attention now. (Question older than 14 days only gets into the community-bulletin if it gets the featured tag.)

I mean, one interpretation of the fact that your question was highly upvoted and no one posted an alternative suggestion is that what you wrote sounded pretty good, or at least unobjectionable, to people

I also don't see why moderators couldn't write the text themselves

if necessary

Well, they could - but I am not sure how likely is that the mods will actually do this.

My general experience on seeing feature requests on MO meta is that sound good is that they are either impossible within the stack exchange software or possible but usually still don't end up happening. This may contribute to a "learned helplessness" where people don't much comment on feature requests on meta.

Back in 2018 I got a response from a mod that he plans to discuss this with other mods. That was the previous version - which is now obsolete.

It's possible that one reason for this is that the current mods are somewhat overworked, in that the time they have available to spend on moderating is just enough to keep the site running. My understanding was that the reason for this election was to improve that situation somewhat.

Now in 2021 I got another response saying that "we haven't gotten our heads together on this".

Thus I optimistically hope that the election will improve the situation.

@WillSawin Re: impossible within the stack exchange software. This is clearly not the case here. It was possible to do this on some other Stack Exchange sites. And it was confirmed by a CM that this should not be a problem.

I know it's not the case here. I'm just talking about the general phenomenon.

My impression is that on MO, if there is a feature request, there are two obstacles: You have to persuade the MO mods and then Stack Exchange staff. If there is a feature request on Mathematics Meta, the mods give some advice and help with the feature request, so it only remains to persuade SE that the change should be done.

For example, the MO mods have never added the status-review tag to question on meta, while on Mathematics, this happened a few times: data.stackexchange.com/meta.mathoverflow/query/1105163/… data.stackexchange.com/meta.math/query/1105163/…

The main problem in this specific situation is that there isn't specific proposal (which would have non-negligible support from the MO community) which could be suggested to the CMs as the new text.

My point is just that given the two obstacles you mention, it's unsurprising that people don't comment much on specific proposals.

Given that the math.se mod who added the status-review tag the greatest number of times is now a MO mod, I really think it's reasonable to be optimistic that this situation will improve.

It seems like a vicious circle: MO users see that nothing happens with any feature-request, so they lost interest in such posts. And if there is no activity (or signs of support from the community| on feature requests, the mods won't act on them in any way.

If one were a MO mod who was willing to spend time and wanted to help more feature requests get through, what could one do? The first thing would be to look for feature requests from the past few years that got the most community support / interaction and forward them to the CMs. This should already get people more interested in commenting on meta.

@WillSawin To me this seems like something that @Catija could answer, since she is a CM. Or perhaps the mods (from MO and from Mathematics) who have experience with feature requests that were implement could chime in.

The next step could be to find some worthy feature requests (like that one) that didn't get enough interaction and then create a new post saying something like "This seems like a good idea. We would like to get input from the community about what exactly to write. We will submit a request to the CM's in 1 month from now. Please make suggestions for what the text should say, discuss and vote on them, and we will try to achieve something approaching a consensus by then."

In some cases, it might be sufficient to add the status-review tag. This moves the question to the attention of SE staff. (I might try to find the post on Meta Stack Exchange explaining this.)

But I suppose that this works only if the feature request is already clear enough. I'd expect that in some cases at least some interaction between the mods and the CMs would be needed. (That would most likely happen in chat.)

For example, when the help page on searching was change on Mathematics, the community moderator who responded to the feature request actually came to discuss this in one of the chatrooms

Re: a new post (asking for input from the community). The moderators have possibility to add featured tag to a post. That adds it to the community bulleting, which might help that more users notice the post and at least some of them respond.

Of course, we're just speculating here - the mods have actual experience on how the things actually work behind the scenes.

Let's suppose for concreteness that one of the new moderators wants to work on this and is willing to add status-review tags, talk to CMs, or whatever is necessary. What can non-moderators do to help? One possibility is collating a list of worthy / neglected feature requests from recent times.

@WillSawin I suppose that sounds reasonable. Let's see what the (old and new) mods say about this.

@WillSawin a list or even raising flags on MO meta can be a way to request the status-review tag. We try to respond to new posts escalated to us within a week of them being tagged.

Generally we try to do things through the mods / with their approval and that's doubly so on MO because the mod/board control the site more than any other site on the network. We are happy to make the changes that we can as much as possible and have made an effort to provide guidance for mods so that they can see what's possible.