Quote Originally Posted by Kraco
That's hardly the issue. This is not military but an anime forum. The difficulty here is quite reverse: Moderators should be good boys and girls and follow the rules, that is, represent to the letter obedience to the rules of the forums, and also the spirit of the forums (I'm not entirely sure what that might be here), and be unbiased in quarrels (until the thread gets locked, but until then everybody always wants to participate if only to joke around).

So, this change doesn't affect other people at all, unless you have some troublemaker who would anyway deserve to get banned for insulting others - mods or regular fellows. So, the problem is that mods can't be free if they are visible.

This is essentially why I always say being a mod sucks, and is vastly overrated. I don't view myself as a toublemaker, but I rather reserve the right to be one than not.
Basically, what you're saying is only one piece of the puzzle.

Participating in a discussion as a moderator has several effects. The first is what I'll call the "biggest ship" effect, and is what I was addressing before. That is, without even trying, just by passing through moderators can make big waves, totally disrupting discussions by making a single post. This is usually a bad thing from everyone's perspective. Ninja-mod solved this problem entirely ... since nobody knew who had power, nobody acted like anyone did.

The second is what I'd call the "chained god" effect. That is, you've got all this power, but you're constrained such that you can only behave in a certain way, precisely because you've got that power. This is the sort of thing you're talking about, and ninja-mod helped with this a bit too, because the mods could be regular users, so could behave like assholes if they wanted to -- as long as they didn't do so while wearing their moderator masks.

The thing is, neither of these effects is necessarily inevitable. I'm hoping that the "biggest ship" effect doesn't show up at all, simply because we've had a pretty substantial volume of discussion involving those moderators -- they're pretty much a cross-section of the most active posters on the board.

"chained god" is a bit tougher. Basically, if we take a strict interpretation of moderator as essentially forumgoing saint, then yeah, they'll suffer from that. But that's an imposition of that particular interpretation of the moderator role. If the mods can maintain a healthy separation between "posting" mode and "moderating" mode (which the ninja-mod system somewhat enforced), then they're free to behave as normal users given normal discussions.

Basically, my personal interpretation of the moderator role is that mods are sort of like house-sitters. They feed the cat (guide discussions), they water the plants (warn/ban idiots, edit out spoilers), and in exchange they get some privileges ... like, dibs on whatever's in the fridge (higher pm quota), access to the nice tv (no gallery quota), etc. Sure, the privileges afforded may not make up for the inconvenience of the responsibilities, but at the same time, they're not such onerous things that you wouldn't do them for a friend (or for the sake of a place you like spending your time).