@quid Personally I am glad that I do not have dupehammer nor moderator powers. Occasionally I voted to close and made mistakes, I would have to be more careful if my votes were binding.
I was under the impression that there is some kind of unwritten rule that moderators should avoid casting binding votes. (See the previous discussion - you can see there some examples of mods posting comments instead of voting and also quote from Carl Mummert which seems to be under the same impression.)
But I thought that this is something which is not explicitly stated somewhere. So it was interesting for me to see that at least in the early days of MSE there was also post on meta stating this policy.
My discussion with Arthur Fischer basically ended with this:
If the main thing I take from our conversation is the following, and if I at least try to act according to that, then this time was not completely wasted: At the same time there is tendency among most active regular users to abdicate their own responsibility to keep the site clean.
So it seems that at the moment it is not feasible to keep the site clean without binding votes by moderators.
If some users prefer them not to use binding votes at all, they should step up and be more active in keeping the site clean, closing, reopening, etc.
Thanks for the explanation! (I would probably have found it if I looked on metas and documentation, but I guessed that there might be somebody in the room who remembers the answer without having to look it up.)
