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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2868 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 29, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Blocking admins doesn't actually do anything, for what I hope are understandable reasons.

I would hope even Reddit doesn't just let a user vanish from the scrutiny of the mods, but I genuinely don't know if that's the case. That would be suboptimal, to say the least.

How did they choose the new mods? I know in the past there was some complicated system.

Multiple rounds of selection.

In the initial round, a bunch of users who the mods considered trustworthy and generally representative of the forum were selected, mainly going off AAQC count and other things, and then asked to nominate the next set of voters, who would go on to nominate the final set, who were then to nominate the people who they wanted to see as mods. I have genuinely lost track of whether there were 2 or 3 preliminary rounds before the final vote.

At that point, the candidates were asked if they were willing to take on the responsibility, and quite a few demurred. The remainder were finally vetted by the existing admins, and the results came out a few days ago.

As you can imagine, this took a while. I think a few intermediate steps could be taken out of the picture, because the people nominated in the second step were almost all the same people who showed up for the final vote, but at least it brought in new faces who hadn't been chosen by the mods at the start.

@ZorbaTHut based it off the election of the Doge in Venice. It seemed to work well enough last time, and if it ain't broke and also happens to be mildly exciting, don't fix it!

Votes were submitted in private to him, but there was no barrier to people declaring or discussing their choices, in a channel made for them. A surprising lack of acrimony, and I don't recall anyone being uncouth enough to nominate themselves, though I'm not sure if that was expressly ruled out.

You couldn’t nominate yourself or a currently banned poster and were limited to 4 nominees were the instructions I got in the third(final) round.

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