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The way moderator levies work, roughly - the first lot of moderators were put together from people Tom knew personally, or knew of personally and could have recommended by people he knew personally. This led to one or two anomalies, but roughly worked out pretty well. However, it also concentrated power in relatively few hands, and those hands largely hands of people who knew each other.
The next moderator levy was 2004 - I have a feeling this may have been related to the decommissioning of the admin suits, and some departures. At that point the requirements for the available moderators were set out fairly clearly, and not every applicant was made a moderator (or possibly those that did were demodded afterwards - I believe that was the case with Ariadne, and maybe some others).
2005 - creation of Games and Gameplay. This was a bold experiment, arguably, where everybody who threw their hat into the ring was made a moderator. I was in fact mistaken; they didn't even need to know their user number. Among the effects of this has been the undermining of the nostrum that being a moderator is proof of one's fitness to be a moderator, and makes problematic the idea of extending powers such as banning to _all_ moderators. By happy chance, most of the more awkward moderators in G&G have left Barbelith, but still have suits and possibly/probably means of accessing them.
Once somebody has become a mod, it's _extremely difficult_ to demod them - technically, it's easy enough, although only Tom can do it, but the social pressure against identifying somebody and appearing to exclude them pushes strongly against it. As far as I know, there have only been two removals of moderator status not requessted by the moderator hirself. |
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