@葉月: Well, in theory more good people onboard don't...

葉月
2009-11-29T09:26:07-05:00

Well, in theory more good people onboard don't hurt. In practice it doesn't work like that. One thing is that every small aberration in anyone's judgement is amplified by the number of people. So if you make a questionable decision once in every T amount of time (and we all do), it'll result in 3.3x as many bad approvals per T when we have 100 mods than when we have 30. Similarly, there's the (always non-zero) probability of appointing the wrong people. And if we have twice as many people, it's twice as likely that at least one shouldn't be a janitor. Or, conversely, they need to be only half as bad to do the same level of damage. And under certain threshold you can't actually pinpoint the wrongness, even if you're seeing its results. That's one thing.

The other is the group cohesion, trust and responsibility. The more people in charge, the less any one of them feels responsible for their actions. It's nothing new. OTOH, the more people we have, the less I can trust that if I leave crap to expire, no-one else will approve it, unless I personally screen each and every other approver. That also touches the issue of the social horizon and the maximal group size one can still internalise.

Thridly, the issue of focus is just as central as ensuring everyone has a decent taste. It doesn't just matter that everyone has a "good" taste, they should also have pretty compatible ones, otherwise we can get into a situation similar to a ring species. Ie. even if any given mod has others who understand perfectly his/her standards, the ones on the opposite ends of the spectrum don't understand each other. And at this point we could either splinter, or get into a situation in which the mods themselves don't understand the moderation standards, which would mean a complete collapse of the whole mechanism. And again, the more people we have, the bigger the risk of blurring it out to the point of incompatibility.

And lastly, in the field I come from (computer science), it's been long observed that the general productivity of a group peaks out very fast, and above that adding more people decreases both the volume and the quality of the results. So the only way forward is to work as hard as possible to make sure everyone is maximally productive, both by choosing the right people and by giving them the right tools.