@Paulster2 "who in the meta actually takes care of problems? The Mods do. Most issues I've seen brought up there aren't ones which need to have a popularity vote on to come to resolution. You plead your case and a mod either rejects it or takes care of it. The voting which may occur on a thread you start may influence a decision, but ultimately only the Mods can make something happen. So, does the meta require participation for the main site to be healthy? In my approximation, no it does not."
Thats not at all how I see it, though.
The mods only enforce what we as the community decide, so it's actually the community who takes care of problems in meta by discussing them and setting rules through a vote.
And that's why a solid meta participation is important.
@atticae ... I understand we have differing opinions. Maybe my opinion is wrong, and maybe that's why there is a low Meta participation in the first place (misplaced understanding).
They surely have the power to place something as off-topic. They can do this on their own. Should they? Probably not, but I've seen it happen over and over again.
As I stated in my writ, if something is obvious, take care of it. If it isn't obvious (or is in the neutral territory of could go either way), as a moderator you can sit back a little and let the community decide (how are they voting on it ...)
I don't always see that with moderators, though. Many have preconceived notions of what is on/off-topic, and make the communities mind up for the community.
@Paulster2 One thing is what you experience and one is what it should actually be like. Nobody doubts there can be contradictions between both, but it seems atticae is concentrating on the latter while you are on the former.
@Paulster2 Okay, I find it hard to speak for other SE sites because I simply am not as involved with them as I am here. But here on M&TV I can't remember seeing the mods deciding something on their own that wasn't fairly clear-cut already. And I would hope it stays that way, because that would be totally outside of their mandate.
If that happens, we have a problem, because this should be a site ruled by the community, mods are only enforcers.
@ChristianRau ... And I could probably be confused with a pessimist, though I try not to tend that way. I try to be more of a realist ... how do things work. Then I look at what I can do to change them.
@atticae ... I don't believe I ever said we don't need people on meta. What I said was, it's not as important as the main site. People don't go to meta to find out things about movies (or coding, or ...).
@Paulster2 But you said, quote: "does the meta require participation for the main site to be healthy? In my approximation, no it does not." If meta participation is not required because mods run everything on their own, I would say the the site is very unhealthy. You probably mean healthy = activity?
@Paulster2 Well, nobody argued against that either, I think, of course Movies & TV is not about the site but the content. That being said, while your response to that question was also quite surprising to me, it was in its current form acceptable enough. But had your recent comment been part of that, I guess my judgement of that questionaire would look largely different.
I had a problem with the meta question in that, if we are supposed to be moderators who are supposed to lay back and let the community "handle" most things, if we start trying to get involvement in the meta, isn't that also over playing our moderator hand?
In any case, I'm glad you agree that mods shouldn't make up rules. I just hope your realism doesn't stop you from trying to increase meta activity should you get elected. I don't want you to say "Well, in reality mods decide everything anyway, so I'll just do that." :D
@ChristianRau ... I was wondering if someone might take it differently than my meaning ... I'm not sure I can really give an articulate answer to the question. I found the question wrong, as I've already stated here. The meta is there to be used when it's needed. If we try to promote it's use, I believe we as mods would be stepping outside of our mandate.
I'm not saying we should promote it just for the sake of its own. Of course meta is only to be used when needed. But once it is needed, the activity is definitely needed, too. I guess a better phrasing would maybe be to increase meta awareness. Often when a problem arises, people either don't know meta exists, or if they do, there are not enough other people who know/care about it to make a reasonable discussion.
@atticae ... yes, there is a fundamental misunderstanding there. I don't believe mods should decide everything. They could if they wanted to and that would break the system. What I'm trying to suggest (and I believe I said elsewhere in my questionnaire) is that the mods are the ultimate arbiter. They do make the decisions ultimately, hopefully it is based on what the community thinks.
@ChristianRau ... well put and agreed.
Again, I don't have a problem with the meta ... the way the question read to me as though it is thought of as the end-all-do-all. The meta is a tool and should be used that way. Does participation help? Absolutely.
We should all be asking each other questions. I would hope other people are reading this chat room, though I would bet, like meta, participation is low.
With the voting as it is (and as I suspected it would be) in the primary, if full voting follows suit, I'm pretty sure I will not be a moderator. There are three main reasons I threw my hat in the mix ... obviously I believe I could do the job and I would love to do the job ... no question there. The other two reasons were because of the comment I left on Johnny Bones' nomination ( I felt since I left that I should put myself out there as well for criticism).
And the other reason is for the experience. This whole process is awesome.
I guess in the actual election I'm probably going to vote not for the obvious "top-liners" but rather for some of the "intermediary" people, from which I think there are enough that would deserve it, too.
@Walt But also don't forget to take a look at the statistics page. The questionaire is important and should be filled out and there are many interesting questions in it, but other questions are bound to be answered with vastly similar answers by all the candidates. (I'm not saying this out of self-promotion, but to give you the best voting experience and I think many people might not be aware of the stats page at all.)
@Walt Indeed, it was about the importance of meta activity (vs meta participation vs meta awareness ;-)) and some misunderstandings, some contradictory positions and some agreeing positions.
I'd definitely want to see some more participation there (guilty of not really posting anything there too, but I go there often). The graduation & design posts had hundreds of views - more of those numbers, please.
@atticae Oh, I will definitely elect him, I'm looking forward to the great purge of deleting each and every ID question he promised for his first day of being a moderator. That will be a joy!
@atticae I love the easy ---strikethrough--- syntax, though. Doesn't work in questions/answers and you don't have any alternative for it in comments at all. (And as long as sartalics aren't implemented yet, strikethrough is still the best alternative to them).
I recently see some instances of bounty as a reward for existing, good answers. I haven't even thought of this before (I thought this was mainly an incentive just to get an answer). Might be the time to hunt down some underappreciated answers
@ChristianRau While I guess some ID answers could be lauded, there's really not a lot more to them other than containing enough relevant details and links and such.
I thought at some point of going over my ID answers and adding some interesting tidbits and trivia, to make them more interesting than a simple identification. But there's too many and it would just bump them up in 'active' and annoy the hell out of people [any way around that, BTW?]
But anyway, election chat. :) So what happens after primary? Would it be like the 1st stage, only with 10 candidates?
@Walt Well, there are a few I would not want to be elected (like this arrogant power-hungry guy who wants to ban all ID questions from the site). But I still find it nice that they only show a 0 when the votes are negative.
The election pages' sidebars state that Stack Exchange elections use the Meek STV vote-counting method:
After m days, the final voting results will be freely downloadable from this page forever, and we will calculate the n winners using OpenSTV with the Meek STV method.
How does that work? ...
@ChristianRau Yeah, not too bothered. Election fraud\screw-ups is for real life :P
I don't think the questionnaire outright asks it, so here's one for the candidates: What do you think the major problems are in M&TV? [And if you do think it has major problems, how dare you?! :P]
@Walt Oh, I for one have answered that in my questionnaire already. Other than the (repeatedly) mentioned one, there aren't any serious problems, I think.
@Walt Oh, if you're going that way, then the top bar features not enough James Bond! I was even about to propose a new 3-year design process because of this. But then again, this would just have delayed moderator elections.
@ChristianRau ... To simplify, we all likes meta but Paulster2 hate meta, so not vote for him! ... I saw that ... and received a down vote in the mean time ... you see what you've started!!
During this period of moderator selection (nomination/primary/election), one of the questions for the nominees was:
While M&TV has a large userbase and many visitors, the meta participation is relatively low and discussions are usually held within a small active core group. Do you see this as...
@atticae Well, ignore that, I as exaggerating a bit. But I was referring to this: "I don't see it as a problem, to be honest. You can't make someone want to be involved on the level that Meta discussions happen. People decide on their own if they want to go to that site. Anyone who says differently is just pandering for a vote."
Which I felt was footed on the same (IMHO incorrect) assumption that encouraging meta participation meant forcing users to go there. But nevermind, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, even though I'm not entirely sure what to make of the "pandering for votes" part.
I'd surmise the vague assumption that if someone actually got antigrav-repulsor-whatever-magic to work as reasonably, we'd heard of it from somewhere else than a weird company promo maybe.
I wanted to go as the Assassins Creed guy, but the delivery time for those costumes is far too long. I don't know where they send it from, Mars probably.
One site even said they have delays because of the Chinese New Year festival. lol
The election pages' sidebars state that Stack Exchange elections use the Meek STV vote-counting method:
After m days, the final voting results will be freely downloadable from this page forever, and we will calculate the n winners using OpenSTV with the Meek STV method.
How does that work? ...
During this period of moderator selection (nomination/primary/election), one of the questions for the nominees was:
While M&TV has a large userbase and many visitors, the meta participation is relatively low and discussions are usually held within a small active core group. Do you see this as...
Movies & TV 2015 Election
Movies & TV 2015 Election