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Like you I was curious. Turns out community moderators get a small diamond symbol next to their names on StackOverflow: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192 h

by jffry 7y ago

Like you I was curious. Turns out community moderators get a small diamond symbol next to their names on StackOverflow: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192

GolDDranks 7y ago
Ah, that explains it. Thank you!
- zahllos 7y ago
  A long time ago I used to moderate on stackexchange (with a diamond) so I'd like to add some important details. That meta post covers it if you know the site well, but it might not be so obvious. Any user with sufficient reputation can vote for some moderator action to be taken on a post. For example, 5 users can vote for a question to be closed. Users can edit. Sufficiently high reputation users can vote to delete and undelete posts as well as closing and unclosing them and get special tools to review questions. Diamond moderators are a level above this. Their votes are immediate and binding (if a diamond moderator votes for something, it happens straight away with the exception of up and down voting, which behave as normal). They are also empowered to email users and suspend them, including practically indefinitely, and can lock a question or answer so users cannot do anything to it (even very high reputation ones) and thus have a lot of responsibility. To get such a diamond, there are two routes: be picked to do it on an early stage beta site (where SE staff select users to do the job temporarily) or run for the job in an election. It's a thankless task, which involves dealing with the very worst of SE's users. You can also be employed by stack exchange. These users also seem to have a "staff" blob on their profile now too - very early on in the site (when it was just SO) they had two diamonds, I think, but that was removed to make the distinction between staff and community not so obvious. On sites like reddit and here, when users complain about "the moderators" they very often mean ordinary site users using the functionality that comes with their reputation and not specifically the moderators with extra power and a diamond after their name. SE's definition of "moderator" is only those users with diamonds. "Hand in my diamond" has in an SE sense become like "hand in my badge".

by jffry 7y ago

Like you I was curious. Turns out community moderators get a small diamond symbol next to their names on StackOverflow: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192

GolDDranks 7y ago

Ah, that explains it. Thank you!

zahllos 7y ago
A long time ago I used to moderate on stackexchange (with a diamond) so I'd like to add some important details. That meta post covers it if you know the site well, but it might not be so obvious. Any user with sufficient reputation can vote for some moderator action to be taken on a post. For example, 5 users can vote for a question to be closed. Users can edit. Sufficiently high reputation users can vote to delete and undelete posts as well as closing and unclosing them and get special tools to review questions. Diamond moderators are a level above this. Their votes are immediate and binding (if a diamond moderator votes for something, it happens straight away with the exception of up and down voting, which behave as normal). They are also empowered to email users and suspend them, including practically indefinitely, and can lock a question or answer so users cannot do anything to it (even very high reputation ones) and thus have a lot of responsibility. To get such a diamond, there are two routes: be picked to do it on an early stage beta site (where SE staff select users to do the job temporarily) or run for the job in an election. It's a thankless task, which involves dealing with the very worst of SE's users. You can also be employed by stack exchange. These users also seem to have a "staff" blob on their profile now too - very early on in the site (when it was just SO) they had two diamonds, I think, but that was removed to make the distinction between staff and community not so obvious. On sites like reddit and here, when users complain about "the moderators" they very often mean ordinary site users using the functionality that comes with their reputation and not specifically the moderators with extra power and a diamond after their name. SE's definition of "moderator" is only those users with diamonds. "Hand in my diamond" has in an SE sense become like "hand in my badge".