I decided to stay away from the queues for today, so why not spend some time answering on Meta!

Diamond moderators are essential to keeping the site clean, fair, and friendly

The first thing you need to understand is that the role of a diamond moderator is diverse. They aren't here to answer questions; they aren't here to post questions. They are here to moderate. Some of their more important duties would be:

Resolving vandalism : Moderators have tools to lock posts, suspend users, and so on. Without moderators, vandals would go unchecked, and users would not be able to handle them. Without diamond moderators to step in, even in the best case, attempts at vandalizing posts would dissolve into rollback wars.

: Moderators have tools to lock posts, suspend users, and so on. Without moderators, vandals would go unchecked, and users would not be able to handle them. Without diamond moderators to step in, even in the best case, attempts at vandalizing posts would dissolve into rollback wars. Resolving rude commentary : Moderators are the only ones who can delete comments single-handedly. You would keep seeing more and more rude comments, and even ruder replies, resulting in more "Stack Overflow sucks" blogs, more t-shirts with the middle finger on the SO logo, and so on.

: Moderators are the only ones who can delete comments single-handedly. You would keep seeing more and more rude comments, and even ruder replies, resulting in more "Stack Overflow sucks" blogs, more t-shirts with the middle finger on the SO logo, and so on. Resolving evaders of system-imposed restrictions : It isn't easy to evade post bans, but there are ways to do it. Although I won't go into details here, moderators are the only ones who can take care of that.

: It isn't easy to evade post bans, but there are ways to do it. Although I won't go into details here, moderators are the only ones who can take care of that. Resolving voting fraud : Here again, a user who has poor answers compared to you would garner way more reputation just by creating a few fake accounts to upvote their posts. This isn't possible when moderators are there patrolling the shores.

: Here again, a user who has poor answers compared to you would garner way more reputation just by creating a few fake accounts to upvote their posts. This isn't possible when moderators are there patrolling the shores. Resolving plagiarism : Users cannot delete plagiarized posts single-handedly if they have a positive score. Without moderators to step in, someone else could easily take credit for your content and end up getting more votes for it.

: Users cannot delete plagiarized posts single-handedly if they have a positive score. Without moderators to step in, someone else could easily take credit for your content and end up getting more votes for it. Resolving trolls: Users have no power to warn, delete, or do anything with respect to repeat trolls.

And these are just some of the main functions that moderators perform. I can go into more, like chat moderation, fixing tags, handling repeat offenders in the review queues, putting a stop to suggested edit trolls, and so many more places where even 25k users have little or no power.

But it goes deeper than that

All that said, the primary reason why you need to be worried is not because of the effect, but rather the cause. Moderators are resigning because they have lost trust in the company staff. This is concerning because users, moderators, and the company are all equally necessary for the growth of the site. The company provides the necessary infrastructure for the site, the moderators help set up the platform by weeding out the bad elements, and the users ultimately provide the content. In this perfect ecosystem setup, when the relationship between any two groups breaks down, it has devastating effects on the other two.

If the moderators decide to pack up and leave, then the company and users would need to do the work that would normally be done by moderators, and who knows how many of the bad elements that we do not need on the site would be disguised as users! There are, in fact, already a number of 10k users who do not know how to review, a lot of 5k users who do not know how to name a tag, etc. Giving them powers to moderate other users wouldn't necessarily be great.

At the moment:

The relationship between the moderators and the company isn't great: The company fired one of the moderators, Monica Cellio, because that moderator had some concerns with respect to a newly-announced company policy. The company fired two Community Managers (CMs) who were known to be very close to the community: Shog9 and Robert Cartaino. Unlike community-elected moderators, CMs are employees of Stack Overflow. The decision to fire these two CMs does not appear to have been financially motivated, but it is unclear, since no details have been provided to us.

The relationship between the users and the company isn't great: The second iteration of the Stack Overflow Quality project never took off, even though it was advertised with much hype. There are a total of 4 developers working on the Stack Overflow public Q&A platform (which is one more than the famous "we less than three developers" quote). The veteran users are blamed for being rude, while in fact the root problem is the influx of poor quality questions. The new users are being blamed for poor quality questions, while in fact the root problem is they're not being given enough advice beforehand on how to ask a good question.



All in all, the three vital parts of the community aren't working well with each other, which should definitely be worrisome for you as a member of the community, no matter how active you are.

Now getting to your question:

I just use Stack Exchange to find answers to my questions, I'm just a normal user.

Here's the problem: With more and more experts leaving, and more and more "normal" (non-expert) users joining, the number of unanswered questions will increase. We already have a huge number of unanswered posts. There are some areas where there are just one or two top players, and if they leave, it would just be a wasteland. You would not even get the Tumbleweed badge as a consolation prize because the company recently removed it, calling it unfriendly. Yes, more new experts would definitely come, but we are losing more of them day by day. The net change would be a decrease.

Not to mention that some experts haven't come to Stack Overflow because it has a reputation of being rude, which would have been solved if the second iteration of the quality project had gone through.

I don't know any of them, I have no emotional connection to them, so I don't care personally about them

The personal connection is something that grows as you get deeper and deeper into the community. Three of the four top-voted questions on Meta are because of the love that the community has shown to moderators. The users elect these moderators, and the moderators serve the users. It is like a properly functioning democracy. The users back the moderators when needed, and the moderators shield the users when needed. You might be emotionally disconnected with users, but when you spend enough time with them, like 2–3 hours per day for 5–7 years, you begin to bond with them. You learn from one another, teach one another, and correct one another.

Stack Exchange continues to help me find answers to questions, and possibly help people who may need it.

This is because of the years and years of effort that the users, moderators, and Community Managers put together. It will certainly not grind to a complete halt within days, or even months, but it will certainly decline over time. The only reason that Stack Overflow survived was because it was a library of high quality posts. The moment there are other equivalent places, it would just fall apart.