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Comment by gouranga | Hacker News Reader

Yes this is getting annoying.

I think when a site reaches critical mass, the pedants and moderati (play on illuminati) start screwing it up. Wikipedia is another fine example of this.

I've stopped contributing to stack overflow now due to this (I accumulated 20k karma to give you an idea how much I thought the idea was promising)

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It's not really as easy as you make it sound. Incorrect moderation will cripple a site and prevent people from contributing, but moderation is necessary to prevent the site from declining in quality. Without moderation, a site's quality will decline with its increased size. The default subreddits on reddit are a good example of what will happen without sufficient moderation.

I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.

AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only.

Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election

While this is correct, I think his complaint is about the privileges that high-reputation users get. Most moderation is done by ordinary users, not by elected moderators.

Your assumption is correct.

That's not strictly true.

Full moderators are elected... but high-rep users take on a ton of moderation tasks.

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