2016 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire

Question

In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Not every question was compiled - as noted, we only selected the top 8 questions as submitted by the community, plus 2 pre-set questions from us.

As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes. Oh, and please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written.

Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.

Good luck to all of the candidates!

Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.

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1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat it's way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

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• Tomoe Mami
• Dimitri mx
• senshin
• Michael McQuade
• Torisuda
• Ayase Eri

Answer 1

In Which Torisuda Answers the Mod Questions in the Customary Long-Winded Manner

1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

This was my question. I asked it before I decided to run, and I thought it was important for the candidates to address because I do think we could use more diversity of material. Anime is so much more than just long-running shounen action. There are anime full of beautiful writing and rich symbolism, anime that push the boundaries of animation as a medium, anime that are strange and truly original enough to rival the most underground of underground comix and the most independent of independent movies. There are genres that have no equivalent in the West. There are anime which are all of those things.

Our site, because of Stack Exchange’s content curation policies, is uniquely well suited to introduce people to this wider world of anime. Stack Exchange is designed to attract experts. In the context of anime, this will usually mean people well-versed in art, literature, film, Japanese language, and other culture areas. We do have such experts here, but I’ve noticed that many of them, not being attracted to the popular shows, don’t have enough questions to answer and can’t hope for a response if they ask their own, so they gravitate towards moderation as a way to keep engaged with the site. We need good people moderating the content, but it’s sad that we can’t find more ways for these experts to contribute valuable content. I look at more diversity as the first step to realizing the full potential of our community.

I tried to stimulate more diversity of content with Proposal: Let's form viewing circles!. People seemed pretty underwhelmed, and looking back, there were some flaws in that proposal. But from interactions I’ve had with other users, there does seem to be an appetite in the community for more diversity; it’s just a question of finding the right stimuli, the right incentives. I don’t know yet what those are, but I’ve got a hundred ideas and I’d like to try them all.

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

Nothing urgent. There are a few rough edges to sand down. This is an area where I prefer to take more of a passive role and wait for issues to arise naturally; I like to leave a few escape hatches in policies to allow for flexibility.

There are a few things like tagging continuities and spoiler policies that we should talk about, but as my product manager says, "These are problems we want to have"—they mean that, as a community, we've moved past the adolescent identity crisis and come to the college years.

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

This was also my question from before I was running, and I asked it because across the SE network, I've seen activist mod teams, I've seen passive mod teams, and I've seen mixed mod teams, and I've seen all of them work and not work.

If elected, I expect to be more on the activist side. Both our pro-tem mod team and our current mod team are more on the activist side, and I feel it's worked well for our community to have them out on the front lines engaging with people. They've been instrumental in organizing events, guiding the community through large and difficult policy decisions, and explaining to new users why Stack Exchange can feel so unfriendly at first. The site is at a place where it doesn't need quite so much activist moderation, but it's not yet at a place where the mods can afford to disappear from view and spend all their time cleaning up messes behind the scenes.

On the other hand, one lesson I've learned in my time on SE is that I don't need to be involved in every decision that gets made and every discussion that goes on. Sometimes, mods should stay out of it and let the community decide. The more dysfunctional activist mod teams I've seen (not going to name any names, but it’s not ours) are the ones that can't do this; they have to offer criticism of one kind or another on every single post. It reminds me of an obnoxious professor I had in college; he would come to every post in our class forum, gleefully nitpick typos, mock our troubles, offer no help at all, and off he went.

As a mod, I would be cognizant of my ability to insta-close and insta-delete, and leave decisions on borderline posts up to the community. If I disagreed with the community decision, I would generally express that through a discussion on chat or Meta, not by unilaterally reversing the decision with mod powers. Mods should avoid the impression that they’re hand-sculpting the site into their own personal police state; being hands-off sometimes is the best way to do that.

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

Our community has a small, very committed core of users who take active parts in moderation and policy. This is a bit intimidating to a potential moderator candidate; when I was considering running, I knew every decision I made as both a candidate and a mod would be reviewed by a group of people who really know their stuff and wouldn't be afraid to call me out. When I realized this was actually an advantage--if I ever made a wrong decision, there would be people to check me and straighten things out--I decided to go for it.

But I'm also not sure why so many people waited until the last minute to slide in their nominations :) I understand it takes time to decide to run, but declaring your nomination so late took away a chance for the community to question you directly and discuss your candidacy.

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat it's way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

Not really. Even though Anime and Manga has "graduated" (and where's our new site design, SE? Don't you love us anymore?), we still have some growing pains to work through, but I don't see a single outstanding issue that needs to be addressed, just lots of little things.

If you had asked me several months ago, I would have said "our community's war machine mentality". Things were bleak in the immediate aftermath of the id request ban. For about a month, we had very few questions, almost no answers, downvotes everywhere, and it felt like every single question that came in had close votes against it. But we've moved past that, our Robespierre-like tendencies have been reined in, and the last month has been vibrant and fun, with several promising new users joining us. The only complaint I have left is that most of the activity has been in popular tags.

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Assuming the comments were not abusive or offensive, merely argumentative, I would first try to get in touch with that user and let them know that a lot of people seem to be taking their comments the wrong way. I would assume good intentions and just ask the person to read their comments twice before posting, to be sure it was getting across the intended meaning.

I would also take this opportunity to let them respond and add more context to the situation. When I was in middle school, I knew someone who got in trouble for violence and angry outbursts on a pretty regular basis. None of the adults knew that he was being goaded and verbally harassed until he lost his temper and lashed out. Sometimes authority figures need to listen to someone to find out what's really going on, instead of assuming everything is just as it appears.

If the user was at fault, and the argumentative behavior continued, I would give the user another warning, worded a little more sharply: going from "Hey, I noticed people seem to be taking your comments the wrong way, can you be a little more careful with your wording?" to "Remember our previous talk? It doesn't seem to be improving. You need to try harder to hold back a little."

Depending on how the user responded to the previous outreach, I might give them a third chance, strongly warning that they are close to a suspension. If the user responded badly or escalated the situation, I might go straight for a short suspension at this point. Continued refusal would be met with longer suspensions.

If the comments were abusive or offensive, the first message would be much sharper and things would proceed more quickly. No one has the right to abuse other users, no matter how many good answers they’ve written.

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Starting a mod war is definitely the wrong way to handle the situation. I would start by asking the other mod, in chat or in comments, to explain the reasoning behind the decision they made. If I felt the question was truly borderline and the other mod’s reasons seemed sound, I would probably leave it there, even if I didn’t entirely agree; these decisions are usually not clear-cut, and sometimes you have to trust your colleague’s judgment, even if it’s not exactly what you would have done yourself. Also, if the community feels the question is valuable, they can override a mod’s decision by voting to reopen/undelete; if that didn’t happen, it would indicate that the other mod made the correct decision from the community’s point of view.

On the other hand, if I felt the question was not borderline, that it fell into an undefined area of our policy, or that the other mod made the decision for unsound reasons, I would probably confer with the entire mod team and start a discusson on Meta to allow the community to have input.

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

Recently I’ve become a big fan of Screen Junkies Movie Fights. It’s a game show where people who love movies answer debate questions like “Pitch the next Wolverine movie”, “Best Quentin Tarantino movie”, “Most traumatizing kids movie”, and even “Which superhero would win the Hunger Games?” The host judges answers based on the quality of the arguments, and there’s a fact-checker to make sure people don’t get away with making things up. It’s a lot of fun to watch, and I think it would be even more fun to play an anime/manga version.

I envision this as a Meta event with accompanying chat events. Some topic ideas I came up with were "Choose a relatively serious anime and pitch a magical girl spinoff starring one of the characters, in the style of Pretty Sammy or Prisma Illya", "What genre should get a Madoka-style deconstruction next and what would the show be like?", and "You've just read the title Boku no Real Love Napkin in a forum; what do you imagine is the plot of this show?" I’ve worked out how we could organize it, and I’ll be happy to jump in chat one of these evenings and talk about it if anyone is interested. It would be a great opportunity for us to get creative, have fun, get some of those “X vs Y?” questions out of our systems, and plumb the depths of our anime knowledge, and as a bonus, we could outsource the fact-checking to the main site by asking questions on anything in doubt.

I also think topic challenges like Worldbuilding, Movies and TV, and Writing do could be interesting. I’d envision it as similar to the tag bounty challenges that senshin was issuing, where we choose a theme, but the question could be in any tag with that theme, not just new tags. We could do it without a bounty like Worldbuilding does, or high-rep users could offer bounties to the top voted posts.

Both of these events would spur more diversity of content by encouraging us all to look outside of our favorite show or favorite genre.

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have time at work to be in chat anyway; I have work to do at work :)

More seriously, Taisho is a beloved part of Maid Cafe, but I can understand where he might be problematic in a work setting. If this is a problem for enough people, we could look into doing a review of the images he posts to make sure they're all reasonably SFW. You can also hide specific users' posts; this might be a good short-term option for people who don't want to see Taisho.

Since Taisho is a subject where I don't have strong opinions, any action I took as a moderator would be taken after a round of discussion and input from the community.

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

This is a bit tough to answer for someone like this:

All I can bring to the team is passion for the site and a track record of working for its benefit, sometimes in helpful ways and sometimes in misguided ways. This is the only anime community that I've ever felt moved to participate in over many years of loving anime, and I want to see it become even more amazing.

Answer 2

Hereby my point of view on the following items ~dimitri-mx~

1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

As [YAS](your anime sucks) once mentioned "For us to make jokes reasonable, at least half the audience should know the anime. Obscure/old is good, but don't expect everybody to like, let alone know it." - Abunaicon '15/'16 The same count's for Q&A. If less people watch it, less people will know the answer, and less questions will pop up. This is a contrast we clearly see on A&M on an almost daily basis. I do not see this as a bad thing perse, as this is where most people's questions will originate from. Therefore I think it is fine as is.

However, we as a community can strive to become a bit more difference. There have been several viewing circles before, where anime was watched together. In these viewing circles questions can be brought to light, and people with more experience in asking question, could help users whom might not know how to properly phrase their question. This will reduce the beginner bar, and help us diversify content.

TL:DR It is fine as it is, however, we as a community can create more diversity by participating together.

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

Most of he policies are pretty clear cut and don't really need any mayor improvements in my eyes as of now. Personally I am more interested to see how other people think about the policies and how we should improve them. And would love to think as a community about them.

However we do have some lingering aftermath of the identification-request. Such as the music ID-requests that we still do. Personally I think that a policy should be established to ensure maintainability, and last ability of the questions, as it wouldn't be the first time that a linked video has gone missing and no time stamp/ episode was given.

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

As a moderator I don't think you can really classify yourself as passive or active, as a balance in both is definitely required. But as a person I would hint towards the passive approach. SE is a community driven, this means that the people in it should have the possibility to voice their opinion, bring up issues and suggest policies them selves.

Here we, the moderators can guide our users to a consensus and help them the the pro's and con's of it. This however will occasionally require use moderators to take a stance, or make a decisions and act upon this.

Some situations however can only be handled upon by moderators, and will therefore require a moderator to take a active stance. This is something I believe reflects fairly well in the way a moderator handles flags and the likes.

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

I think there is indeed some barrier. The first time I ran for moderator (given that it was joke worthy) I did not have the feeling I would even have a snowball's chance in hell. The other people were way more versed in how the community, site and other SE communities worked. They looked like veterans in my eyes. And why sign up for a losing battle? Or fear that would would not do it correctly anyway.

SE in general has a bit of an elitist feel, and I think that moderators often subconsciously reflect this as well. Not because they want to be, all though they sometimes definitely do (hinting to SO mods). This all together might scare off other people, or make them feel less qualified for the job. Hence leaving it in the hands of somebody else.

On a side note. A downgrade from 8 to 7 participants, considering there are less positions available this time is not so much of a regression. But more of a progression in my eyes.

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat it's way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

I don't believe that there are currently any dilemmas as big as the identification-request. But I do believe that some of the after math of it needs some clearing up. Even after the removal of id requests, we still see a lot of music identification requests. Personally I believe some guidelines would be in place here, as it wouldn't be the first time that a YouTube video was provided, which was removed just as fast as the question was posted.

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I would start of by attending the user on it's behavior, and how it is not in line with our be-nice-policy, either through chat, comments or other viable solutions. If this does not work more drastic measure might have to be taken. But unless it is really clear cut vandalism/profanity, I do consider discussing it along with other moderators, or if necessary even members first.

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I would contact the moderator in question and ask him too explain his motives, either through the chat, or meta posts. Which is not that different from what I did as a regular user either. The freedom to question such things is not only for moderators.

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

Yes, I would love to see more community events, and help out with organizing them. And as much as I would like to see more events such as the EU meet up, I also understand it is hard/expansive considering everybodies daily life's and the many places we come from. non the less, I have plenty of ideas for annual events, both remotely located and physically located which fall within reasonable limits for most of us. But I guess I could even dedicate a whole meta post too this in itself, which I will actually do some time soon.

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

As a NSFW victim, I think Taisho is a cool guy. As long as my boss ain't near. His images can be a bit intrusive, but they ain't a nuisance as of yet. Hence I am in favor of keeping him.

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

All though I have not moderated on SE sites before, I have moderated on several fora before. With a clear grasp on whats going on by lurking around all day I hope to improve our community, and act upon violations swiftly.

Answer 3

Hello, senshin here.

1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

It is a somewhat unfortunate fact of life that long-running action/adventure shows lend themselves to SE-style questions far more easily than most other types of shows. (This is only unfortunate insofar as it would be unfortunate if any small collection of shows were disproportionately "good" at giving rise to questions.)

Something should be done about this. I admit that I don't have a good idea of specific interventions that would be effective here. As a regular user, I make a deliberate effort to ask questions about things that are not frequently asked about, but that only goes so far. I'm going to try out a variant on my old "bounties for tags" idea this coming month, and if that works, huzzah, but I don't have my hopes up.

I don't think that this is a problem that is likely to resolve itself naturally. "ActionAdventureAnime.SE" would probably be a stable equilibrium, and it's one that we might currently be heading towards (I haven't looked at the data; this is just gut-feel for now). I think it will take effort to ensure that we end up at an equilibrium that more closely reflects the overall demographics of "people who have questions about anime".

What, then, would I do specifically as a moderator? I'm not really sure (aside, again, from enjoying the extra gravitas afforded by a diamond when one leads by example). Torisuda's recent proposal for "viewing circles" seemed like a great idea to me, and I would definitely be willing to put some time in to get something similar up and running.

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

The series-tags thing that Torisuda brought up here is reasonably important to discuss, and I've already given my thoughts on it over here. Other than that, nothing really pressing comes to mind. For the most part, our policies seem reasonably good and reasonably stable at this point.

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

At our current size, any four moderators are inevitably going to constitute a large fraction of "people who contribute heavily to meta discussions". I think the site is better-off today - though perhaps not in the far future - if all our moderators (including myself, if elected) are reasonably "activist". Krazer's "activism", in particular, has historically led to a number of positive outcomes; I see this as desirable for the well-being of the site.

The "glorified janitors" line has always made perfect sense on SO, where the primary function of a moderator is to janitorialize things that the community cannot or does not. Here, where the moderators are scarcely even necessary for janitorial tasks? Not so much.

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

I see no barriers to nominating oneself for modship. 7 is not much smaller a number than 8. In fact, 7 divided by 1 is considerably larger than 8 divided by 3. Arithmetic!

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat it's way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

With identification requests gone, there are no immediate existential threats to the site. This is good.

There is still a longer-term threat to the well-being of the site: what if we get so many questions on Naruto and its ilk that they dominate the front page? At some point, this becomes self-reinforcing - who would want to visit a site full of Naruto questions, other than someone who already likes Naruto? (I'm not saying that this state of affairs is an inevitability; merely that it is a possibility - and one that I think is not even all that likely. Nonetheless, it behooves us to think about the this possibility and mitigate this risk where possible.)

Obviously, we cannot and should not ban Naruto questions, as we did id-reqs. So we need a different approach to ensuring that this doesn't become Naruto.SE - and that approach is to encourage diversity of content. See question #1 in this post.

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Same as last time: we are still in a place where valuable content is worth enough that I think we ought to mop up after argumentative users who write good posts. I maintain that I would probably do no more than tell the user to tone it down, either in comments or in chat.

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Also same as last time: post about it on meta for discussion. Unilateral closures and deletions of reasonable posts are still not a problem we have, so this is hardly a thing that happens anyway.

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

I have no interest in coordinating or otherwise being involved in "real-life" events. I don't object to them on principle or anything; they're just not my cup of tea. I prefer to keep my internet life and non-internet life fairly separate.

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

I imagine I've been one of the primary complainants here. To be clear - I guess I'm okay with Taisho posting images in the chatroom (though I don't see the point of it - I think it just clutters up the chatlog and makes us look like weirdos). It's just that keeping Taisho around will keep me out of the Maid Cafe most of the time.

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

I will create so many tag synonyms. Please. I want tag synonyms. Let me have this.

Answer 4

Ayase Eri

1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

There is nothing we can do to prevent people from asking questions on Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note especially since they are famous world wide, compared to shows like Date a Live for example. However I believe that we do need diversity. If most questions are about those said anime/manga, then this site would become so homogenic, and it will be no longer fun and interesting.

We can't ask people outsite our community to give more diverse questions, so it falls on us to do so. Which means that we need to expose ourselves to various different anime/manga, that is read more manga, watch more anime, indulge ourselves in news regarding anime, manga, seiyuu, to make ourselves more knowledgeable. Anyone who get elected as the new moderator needs to promote such way of life by, for example, post random news about seiyuu or a quick summary on a manga or anime he/she found in the chat room to make people interested in it every now and then.

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

No, currently none.

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

Mostly passive. Of course when there are valid concerns that needs to be addressed then the moderator should bring it up so that we can all decide what to do with it. Moderator can post their own opinion on the matter, but given their status, they should also make it clear that that is an opinion as a user and as a member of the community, not as a moderator.

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

There is not much of a difference between 7 and 8 to make me think that only a few nominated themselves to be a mod. What is more interesting is that the last 3 candidates signed up on the last day and almost the same time. If there is any barrier at all to this election then it is because we have senshin nominating himself while at the same time only 1 will get selected as the new moderator. Currently senshin has the highest candidate score, even higher than the 3 moderators (Madara, Tomato, and Krazer). This might have prevented people from applying because either they feel they stand no chance against senshin or they feel, "why don't we just vote senshin since he clearly is the best candidate we have." I think Tomoe Mami nominating herself has something to do with why we have the additional 3 candidates singing up late. Indirectly she encouraged people to sign up since she clearly has the lowest candidate score.

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat it's way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

Diversity issue. Lately we have too many Naruto, Bleach, One Piece questions, especially Naruto. There is nothing we can do to stop people, especially new users from asking questions about those anime, nor should we do anything to stop them since such action would be harmful to the site in that we are cutting ourselves from potential addition of regular users. Talking from personal experience, I get uncomfortable with this, I even ignored a question about Naruto that I should be able to answer out of being bored of answering Naruto related questions. I think something needs to be done to increase the diversity so that users, especially old users won't get bored of this site and making us potentially losing them. This can only be done if we are more familiar to various different anime/manga. Which is why I suggest in my answer for the 1st question that a short summary of a manga or anime be posted every now and then to make people interested and pick them up.

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I think such a thing is fine. But since we are not forum, then after 10 or so comments, we need to move it to the chat so that it won't get too long. Later on the conclusion gained from the chat can be posted as a comment or an edit to the answer.

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Be open with him, try to talk to him in the chat or post question in meta and explain why I think the question should not be closed. Being open is important here since we are communicating with text only and thus unless we write it there is no way other can know what we are thinking since we can't read their facial expression.

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

Conspiracy Santa happens on Northern Hemisphere Winter. We need event for the other seasons to increase our nakama-bond (community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation). Since we are Anime and Manga SE, we need activities that is related to those. Thus, my suggestion is...

• Spring (Spring Gathering)

In spring people gather to enjoy the sakura (like what Toshinou Kyouko did with her friends in Yuru Yuri San Hai! Ep. 12). This event should be done on weekend to ensure participation. The gathering will be done on rabb.it and pretty much like Krazer has done (see this post). Announcement should be made 7 days prior to remind everyone. Users are encouraged to suggest what to watch. I propose doing this yearly on the first Sunday of March. With fixed time and prior announcement it would be easier for people to allocate time to ensure they can join the event.

• Summer (Summer Ghost Story)

What is commonly shown as an activity people in anime and manga do during summer is dating, losing virginity, change appearance, courage test and gathering around a candle and tells ghost stories. The first 3 won't help our community, the 4th is hard to do since we are all living in different parts of the planet. So I suggest the last, Ghost Story telling.

A question will be opened every year on August 1st UTC 0:0:0 and participants can post answer until August 14th GMT 23:59:59. Participants can post a ghost story as an answer. All users can give +1 on stories that they think is scary. Winner for the year is the one with the most vote. Since we now have badge for series (such as Naruto badge), maybe we should also give Summer-Kaidan-[INSERT YEAR HERE]-Champion badge to the winner as to encourage participation, especially since it is going to be a unique one-of-a-kind badge.

• Fall/Autumn

Sorry, no idea how we can turn Sports and Culture festival into something that can be done regardless of time difference. Will post something later when I get some idea.

EDIT: Okay, I just remembered that other than the festival, they also have election where they choose the King and Queen of the school. So we will do our own election. Categories including Best Male Seiyuu, Best Female Seiyuu, Best Male Character, Best Female Character which will be separated into 4 different questions. Every user can only post 1 candidate for each category along with the reason why they think he/she deserves the title. The candidate must be featured in an anime/manga during the last year. So for the 2016 event, only characters/seiyuu featured from Fall 2015 to Summer 2016 is eligible. For example, for the Best Male Character 2016, Sakamoto is eligible, Kurosaki Ichigo is eligible (since the manga still runs during that time period), Katsuragi Keima is not since TWGOK anime and manga didn't run during the time period. If it is hard to keep track on which manga still run during the time period, which not, then we can keep it as anime only.

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

The main reason why Taisho was criticized was because the images posted was borderline hentai or too kinky. The images he posted now is a lot better. Taisho, I think is a good addition to our chat room that makes it unique, so we need to preserve the cat. As long as no NSFW pictures posted, it should be fine to keep him.

Of course since we are all living in different countries with different values, then the pictures needs to be regulated strictly, so an image of Kashiwazaki Sena with her cleavage showing is a no no even if she is fully clothed. In other words, the images posted should be neutral enough so that it is acceptable regardless of cultural and value difference. It also needs to be diverse enough. Even if the images is SFW, but if all it posted is pictures of loli or girls, then it is still no good. Adding anime scenery images would be a good addition, I think.

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

What we needed the most, and is the reason why we have this election in the first place, availability.

Answer 5

Amelia / Tomoe Mami

1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

As a user, the easiest way to go about making it a little more diverse here is probably to just keep with the current season of anime and ask questions on anime.SE.

As a moderator (and as someone interested in community-building), you want to see more diverse questions; if every question on the site is about the same couple of fixed topics, you're going to start to have to close everything as a duplicate and then the site will start to stagnate.

The most popular series here are actually the mainstream anime for the 20-30 age bracket, and so I'd wager that's probably the average age of anime.SE users. People generally know their favourite anime well, and so a lot of content is posted here.

Considering just how much material exists, though, I'm fairly confident things will eventually even out.

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

From frequenting other sites, I'd say the way that tags work here should probably be simplified properly.

People have a laser-like focus on doing an exact single-tag-per-post system, but that's not actually the way the system on stack exchange works. Rather than tagging fullmetal-alchemist-manga (as an example), doing fullmetal-alchemist fma-manga (with a synonym for fma) is a better use of the tagging system and makes things easier to find. This can also probably tackle the length limit effectively. This does, however, require heavy mod interaction for cleanup + synonyms + merging tags.

However, prefixed wildcard searches may possibly make this moot, though we'd have to start using abbreviated tags for anime in that case.

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

I definitely default to a passive approach; I only get involved if I know/feel I have to, which is usually a mix of gut feeling, asking the other mods, or asking in the mod-only room.

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

I'd say the people who are the most likely to actually be elected are already active chat users, but probably didn't want to take on the responsibility/commitment of being a mod this year. Quite a few people had to be convinced to put forward a nomination, and I nominated myself half hoping that it would encourage others to put their names forward, and half because I feel that, although I have a fairly low contribution to the site as a user, I do feel like I can contribute way more as a moderator.

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat its way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

I don't really think there's anything that needs to be buried six feet under right this second.

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I've seen this exact thing happen on Freelancing, and myself and the other mods there keep a close eye on the user in question. I value their contributions, but on several occasions we've had to pull the user into (private) chat and explain to them that, while they may be a significant chunk of the questions and answers on the site, they still have to abide by the be nice policy and would face potential suspension if they continued.

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I'd ask them in chat what the reasons were; often-times perfectly good questions being closed are actually part of a clean-up from spammy users posting questions/answers to sock-puppet with. In those cases, dissociating the user is often a good way forward. For other reasons, it really does depend, but I don't undo another mod's actions without good reason and/or consensus.

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

I desperately want to actually attend a meetup with anime.SE, as during beta a bunch of us were actually planning to meet up for a vacation in akihabara, but I never actually got to go. I'm a fan of regular community meetups for stack exchange communities in general, as the smaller communities feel much closer than S[UFO] and the other large sites, so I'd probably try and get a UK or Ireland meet organised at some point.

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

I'm against it; I moderate in my spare time (sometimes at work), and I like to be on chat. I've actually nearly gotten in trouble because Taisho was posting while I was at work. I'm also not sure an imagebot has a place on chat.SE.

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

I'm an experienced mod with a level head who grew up with online anime communities. I'm also a better tomato than Toshinou Kyouko. And that's a fact.

Answer 6

Michael McQuade

1. Quite a lot of the activity on the site is concentrated around just a few shows: mainly Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Death Note. While these are all fine shows, they hardly showcase the diversity of anime, and don't leave a lot for people who aren't fans of long-running action/adventure. What's your take on this situation? Is it fine as it is, or should the community strive for more diversity of topics—more shoujo, more older anime, more artsy/experimental material like Aku no Hana and Goodnight, Punpun? If you support more diversity, what steps would you take as a moderator to make it happen?

Striving to fit into something to me seems, artificial. Instead, let the questions we have be about the anime we like to watch. Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragon Ball, Death note, are all very popular examples of anime, and thus we see lots of questions being asked about them. With the exception of Death Note, these are all very long running shows which have vast universes, and many questions can arise over the span of their thousands of combined episodes. I don't see it as wrong for there to be more questions in a certain category just because they are more popular.

2. Last year we asked the community about things they wanted to be clarified or fixed about our policies on Anime & Manga. This helped myself as the newly elected mod highlight some topics for review. One year on and a new meta post later, Is there any particular policy the site currently has that you feel needs to be changed, or reviewed?

I agree with Krazer about our spoiler policies being inconsistent. For instance: is a spoiler in the title OK? Well, if it's the "best" way to write the title then yes. If it would otherwise make the title ambiguous, then yes. What about spoiler tags? This is pretty much left to poster discretion, or the community to edit in later if someone feels they don't like it.

We should decide where we stand as a community about spoilers. One side of hurting search indexing of posts while keeping the site spoiler-free or the other side of possibly upsetting some of the community. Concreting this would allow us to be very up front to new users about what to expect on our site, and what cautions to take.

3. Some Stack Exchange moderators are activists—they take a strong leading role in the community, bringing up issues, guiding discussions, suggesting policy, and creating initiatives. Others are more passive; they let other members of the community shape policy, enforce it less stringently, and wait in the wings for exceptional situations that require their unique abilities. The passive approach fits more with Stack Exchange's description of moderators as "glorified janitors" and "human exception handlers" as laid out in A Theory of Moderation and other posts. However, activist moderators can be good for a site; they can help unite and guide a user base, and can ensure that a valid concern brought up by a significant minority of the community gets a fair hearing and doesn't get automatically ignored in favor of the majority view. As a moderator, would you be more of an activist, or would you take a more passive approach? Why? How would you recognize a situation that would benefit more from the opposite approach, and how would you deal with it?

I much prefer the sense of community responsibility that StackExchange provides over the traditional experience that we find in an internet forum. Everyone here works together, and gives input on what they want out of this site. We all work together to keep the site clean, and to help new users learn to use the site.

I appreciate this fact, and would like to keep it as autonomous as possible. I don't think that a moderator should be necessary at all for change to take place in the community, or for concerns to be addressed within our meta. I believe, that this is even more true because of the smaller size of our StackExchange community.

I favor the moderator position to be viewed as outlined in the theory of moderation blog post, as an elected janitor, handling issues that fall outside the norm.

4. This year we have only had 7 Candidates nominated to join the mod team while last year there was 8 candidates. can you see any sort of barrier that would prevent other users from applying to become a part of the mod team in the next election? If so, in what way do you think we as a community can overcome this barrier? If not, what are your opinions as to why so few nominated to become a mod this time?

I would have preferred that this election be much bigger, with several more candidates in mind. I know each person has some individual reasons, but I can only share my own reservations. I know that Krazer has invested countless hours into this position and I respect the amount of work that he's put into helping out everyone in our community. The investment in time is valuable, as everyone has their own lives and busy schedules. I'm relieved there is another moderator spot opened to help distribute some of that existing work around a bit.

I haven't talked to Madara or our Tomato very much outside of the Maid Cafe, but I have come to understand that this reservation holds true even for our existing moderation.

To answer your question of why so few candidates have nominated themselves, I don't believe this is unusual at all. If we look at a normal meta thread about changing some policy, or a discussion about our site, we will notice that these topics don't generate huge numbers of participation. It's generally the same group of faces that you'll see in each thread. I would not expect participation in a moderator election to be much different from those results.

I appreciate the efforts of community members such as Torisuda who have stepped up in recent times to keep our Meta thriving, and I believe that continuing to bring up topics in our Meta is what will drive future interest in community events, elections, and discussion about our site.

5. Last Year we had problems with Identification Requests with what should be done with them being asked of the candidates in last year's mod election. With the topic now dead, buried, covered in concrete and without a spoon to eat it's way out is there another outstanding [single] subject that you think the community needs to address? why does this subject need to be addressed?

I'm happy that we came together and figured out that identification request questions weren't a good fit for our site. I don't have similar strong feelings about changing another feature on the site at this time.

6. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Immediately, users come to mind that aren't exactly patient, friendly people. Particularly theres some animosity towards newer, inexperienced users of our site. Both these older members and the new, inexperienced users are valuable to our site. I appreciate the "be nice" policy at Stack Exchange, and I do feel like it's often forgotten. I think that we as a community should call out users when we see them speaking to others in a way that we would find rude in real life. I hope we wouldn't let that happen in the real world. Let's not use the fact that this is an internet powered discussion as a reason for us to be allowed to be mean to others.

Basically, communication is the first step in resolving any problem that we come across. It would only be in regrettable circumstances would a moderator need to take any action past that.

7. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I would first try to see if I could understand their perspective on my own. If I still felt strongly that their action was incorrect, then I would chat with them about their reasons, and work together to see if there was a mututal agreement that could be reached. If no agreement could be reached after that, then I believe that this issue is not as cut-and-dry as it first might have seemed and is better off handled by the community on a meta post than by a single moderator.

8. We have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up. Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

Personally, what was truly the glue holding me to this community was the organized simulatenous watch parties (using Rabb.it) that Krazer would host. While we haven't had these in a few months, to me they were what an anime community is really all about. We were doing the thing we already know we all love, watching anime.. together. It always generated a few new questions per session and we had a lot of fun together chatting and making jokes during the sessions.

I know these aren't for everyone and the schedules can't work for everybody, but I think that these events are where we're really doing what we love doing and with people that share those interests. Having Anime & Manga as a platform for that is great, because new people can always join at any time and that means you're getting new perspectives with each show you watch.

9. What's your opinion on Taisho posting images in site's main chatroom? Taisho's image posting did got criticized in the past for being unnecessary or for not being safe for office. So what you think in favor or against it?

I have no problems with Taisho and from what I've seen, the complaints are unfounded. We have a question here on A&M about why anime is considered weird porn by western culture, and I'd say this lines up with the flags that Taisho has received. People on other parts of the network don't necessarily understand our culture, pop into the chat room, and have culture shock.

10. What additional value would you add to the existing moderator team?

I will continue being an active member of this community whether or not I become a moderator for A&M. The extra responsibilities of moderation would merely be a way for me to assist the existing moderation in keeping the site maintained. I would be happy to contribute to any plans the community has for adjusting the site in any way those priveleges made possible.