I would like to express my interest in becoming a moderator.

Introduction

My name is Mark, I am working on my M.Sc. in Computer Science with a focus on Automatic Speech Recognition and working as a part-time programmer. While I am neither a die-hard Bitcoin expert, nor a financial expert, I believe that I have achieved a solid understanding of Bitcoin.

There still regularly are some questions that are just beyond me, but I think I don't have to be able to answer every question to help with moderation.

In the past six months, I have

answered 128 questions

raised 380 flags (8 declined), reviewed 1,015 flags

cast 1,684 votes, left 535 comments

edited 310 posts

Also, I was probably the most active user on meta this year. (Which unfortunately, is less of an achievement than I would like it to be.)

While I am from Germany, I have a solid command of English. Except commas – they tend to crop up in weird places sometimes! ;)

I am currently the room-owner of the chat room Bitcoin Lounge associated with our SE. (Drop by for some coffee!)

Most pressing topics

Waning community

Looking through the user roster and old meta discussions, it seems to me that the Bitcoin.SE used to be a lot more lively. People used to know about other users "getting married".

I have met one other Bitcoin.SE user at a Bitcoin meet-up, and a few people have dropped into the Bitcoin chat, but it feels like the community had dispersed before I started coming here. We've dropped down to mechanically doing our parts on the exchange, but the discussion about it, and the social experience has waned mostly. I would support efforts to get more life into meta, and again would like to invite you to drop by the chat any time. I am considering to commence a weekly "Bitcoin hour" in chat to get together.

Flood of low-quality questions getting answered

There are dozens of questions closed as duplicates that have new answers. This dilutes the quality of our database: The best answer might be on any of a set of duplicates. Duplicates should be closed as such more quickly and should perhaps also be consolidated in some cases. There are also some chains of duplicates i.e. Question A ---dup---> Question B ---dup---> Question C.

In other categories, this leads to people asking for clarification and/or downvoting a question, but it still getting answered before the ambiguity is addressed. By not closing or even deleting quickly, we are fostering a breeding ground for low-quality questions and answers, wasting our answerers time reading through these questions and wasting our visitors time by keeping them.

Our guidance on which questions are worth keeping should be reviewed and enforced more consistently. This especially relates to the required "previous research", "off-topic", and the general quality of questions we accept as worth an answer. For example, I support the answers of Artem and Chris on Can we remove "based on actual problems that you face." from the FAQ? in this regard: Questions should leave the impression that somebody is seriously thinking about them.

As a relatively new user, I find that better guidance on our quality requirements would help new users a lot to support moderation and allow advanced users to apply it more consistently.

Edits only fix part of the problems

This is somewhat of a nuisance: Very often edits only fix part of the problems with a post. For example, a few typos are fixed, when others remain, or just the title of a question is rephrased, while the tags remain completely wrong. We could generally do a better job fixing posts completely instead of partially. This should be especially kept in mind by people accepting suggested edits, that they use the "improve" button more often.

Plea for guidance

One thing about the prospect of becoming a moderator I am fairly uncomfortable with: My votes would become binding. From exploring the questions, this seems to have grossly changed other moderators flagging behavior. (Some moderators were lauded for their flagging and voting before they were selected as such, now it seems less hands-on for many of them.) I am a fairly opinionated person, so I actually find it easy to flag things for moderator attention when I think it is worth a look. However, with binding votes, I would be "passing judgment" instead of starting a collective review. I am very divided about this: On one hand, I think that the Bitcoin.SE would benefit a lot from stronger moderation, but on the other hand, this kind of action would perhaps raise dictatorial impressions with users. My first instinct would be to ask guidance from other moderators, however, this seems to dispensed sparsely these days or invisible to regular users. I would hope that there would be more access to the other moderators to discuss ambiguous cases.

Thanks for reading, thanks for your consideration.