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Has it ever been an issue here? Moderators running amok, I mean. Or does distributed moderation solve a problem that never really existed?
I can only really give a similar answer to the one here (and, again, that's probably the best response I can give to the first of fridge's points).
We did have a period of standard board moderation, where any moderator could pass any action on their own and without that action having to gain a set number of votes, but it wasn't something that lasted for a very long time before the current system - or a version of it - was introduced. I think that was red/grey Barbelith, which was easily the shortest-lived of the phases we've gone through.
The thing to remember there is that the board was a a significantly different place, with a significantly different membership to now. There were only something like 100 registered members (not including joke suits and the like), the overwhelming majority of whom seemed to know each other in real life. So issues of trust and responsibility were simply never raised.
DM came about when the place started getting wider publicity, and we started suffering some of the problems common to other boards, but which Barbelith had never really encountered to any great degree previously. The plan, as far as I'm aware, was partly to prevent those problems from becoming as prevalent here as they are elsewhere by setting up a system to combat them before they started occurring.
Which is why that's a difficult question to answer. If you've got a system in place to prevent something happening, you'll never really know if it's working effectively or not.
But... we have had people who were previously perfectly decent, non-trollish members of the board suddenly lose it and go off on a bit of a board-wide bender in the past. I think two of those people may have been moderators at some point - one certainly was, but had thankfully been removed from the rota through inactivity before they went loopy, and I know that the other was at least suggested as a possible candidate for moderator prior to their mini-rampage. So I think a moderator running amuck is a distinct possibility. I'm sure we've all seen it happen elsewhere, anyway.
There's another potential problem which DM largely prevents, and that's the issue of consistency. It forces moderators to communicate with each other, and so helps to avoid the mess that other boards can get into when one mod decides that a thread should be locked, or a member banned, or a thread moved, then another mod pops along a little later and disgrees with that action and sets everything back as it was. And so on and so forth, until the entire board get very, very fed up. A good example of both of these problems - lack of communication and a moderator overstepping the boundaries of their role - is this thread from another forum.
That sort of messy embarrassment simply wouldn't be possible here with the system we've got. If there's a disagreement about a particular moderation action, then it gets vetoed (along, hopefully, with a PM being sent to the person proposing the action from the person disagreeing, explaining why they used their veto). The only exception to this is if moderators fail to check their jobs properly before agreeing them. |
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