Should moderator decisions be more visible to the community?

Question

It's extremely difficult to find out what decisions moderators are making when it comes to deleted answers: either your answer is deleted (which is hopefully rare among upstanding members of this community), or you have to repeatedly check the same question and notice that an answer has been deleted, and not know whether the decision was a moderator's.

I understand most moderators are undoubtedly attempting to apply community standards evenly. But to do so perfectly consistently is not possible: moderators make mistakes, perhaps usually benign ones. But I'm concerned about subconsciously holding conclusions they disagree with to a higher standard--it's a cognitive shortcut inherent to our biology. Anyone who doesn't see this as one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the platform should probably not be moderating for this particular community in the first place.

The problem is, there is no way for the community at large to evaluate the behavior of moderators (i.e. to see deleted answers). And one can hardly ask a moderator to objectively evaluate their own work or even that of their peers.

Reasonable, debatably conforming, but unpopular content is possibly some of the most important to preserve in a skeptics community.

And even if moderators were 99% objectively correct, there seems to be an intrinsic "deletion" bias—if e.g. 99 moderators thought something met community standards and one didn't, presumably the last would simply delete it, without that decision is automatically reviewed by the 99 (surely they're too busy anyway). And there's no formal appeal—flagging a decision might be reviewed by the same moderator, or perhaps 1 other, who might simply be pressured or predisposed to support the decision of their peer. The system is already rigged against Jeff Atwood's idea that the "ideal moderator does as little as possible". I can't even express my entire question without it being censored.

And of course elected moderators are variously respectable members of the community—but the community largely has no idea what decisions they're ultimately making. Most decisions are doubtless mundane, but surely there are impeachable offenses. And when elections come, I'd frankly rather review their most controversial decisions than a statement about why they think they're great.

Everyone loves to stress how special the skeptics community is. But shouldn't this community, above all others, have some real guarantees regarding moderation?

Answer 1

Thanks for your question. I also think moderators should be evaluated based on their decisions and that deletions should be reviewable. I can say there's a broad agreement on this in the community.

Not only we agree with that but in fact, the people who built the Stack Exchange website software^† are also on the same page and the moderation system of all Stack Exchange sites guarantees that moderators actions are reviewable.

Reviewing moderator actions requires a user to have adequate experience on the site so that such reviews are of the highest quality and not based on a superficial knowledge of the community. Such a principle is the basis of the Stack Exchange system. Users need to earn the trust of their peers before the system grants privileges to them.

In particular moderation privileges start at 10,000 reputation points and at that privilege level users have access to a specific page to monitor deletions.

Thanks to this system there are 40 skeptics users as of May 2019 with moderation powers that can review deletions. Many of them are active daily, and routinely we find they do look at questions and do use these tools.

Nevertheless, you might want to suggest that we change this privilege level to lower reputation scores so that more people might see deleted posts. If so, your question does not make a convincing case of why this should be so, in my opinion.

If instead, you wanted to suggest that we conduct such review publicly -- I strongly disagree with this. There are reasons why this is a bad idea. First of all, moderation must be a meritocratic system and not a populistic one: if we did not base moderation reviews on users' reputation score, we would allow anyone with an anonymous email address to vote on an issue with the same authority as someone who spent eight years looking every day at the site.

Secondly, when we delete a post, we do so to with the purpose of hiding it, so there are reasons why we do not want the community to be able to see it. Allowing any users who disagree with a post being hidden to make it public again (albeit on meta) prevents us from effectively moderating that post at all. There have been many cases where trolls posted unwanted content and, once deleted, reposted it here to make sure it was visible. It's not a viable way of running a community.

Thanking you again for taking the time to write such a post, please reconsider your position. While we are fallible human beings, and well aware of the fact, most of our policies are time-proven and well-thought-out.

I'm more than happy to continue this in a chat if you have more questions.

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^{†Disclaimer: I was part of the Stack Exchange team for four years.}

Answer 2

At a certain reputation level, non-diamond-mods can see deleted answers in a non-deleted question (and also deleted questions, if they have a link to it or have favorited it).

If deleting an answer “bumps” a question (I don’t know whether it does), then an inquisitive member of the community would be able to see what’s going on if they so wished. That’d provide a certain level of oversight.