In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected [from an earlier thread](https://ux.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3247/2018-moderator-election-qa-question-collection) have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers.

Due to the submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as our back up questions for a total of 9 questions.

As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just [copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes](https://ux.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/e3e28355-938b-4b9f-ad3c-e3a03572edeb/view-source).Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.

Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.

Good luck to all of the candidates!

**Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.**

To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):



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>1. Participation in this communities Meta site is rather low. Do you feel this is a problem, and if so - how would you go about increasing participation and use of this aspect of the site? The same goes for the Chat. Most participation of this site is focussed exclusively to the main Q&A page. Is that an issue? How would you change this if so?



>2. Subjectivity is all part of User Experience design, but Stack Exchange as a platform doesn't really fit well with subjective opinions - it's a Question and Answer site, providing visitors with a curated list of questions around specific problems that User Experience Designers have, and the respective solutions to those problems. With this in mind, how would you balance deciding what questions are too far into the subjective territory to be appropriate to this site? What criteria do you go by before deciding to cast that binding 'close' (or delete) vote as a moderator?



>3. A low-quality question is posted by a user with 1 reputation point (e.g. "hi do i show Order history in navigation if they have 0 orders? thanks). Would you be more inclined to start a dialogue to try and teach the asker how the site works and/or guide them to the help center so they can supplement and clarify their question and avoid closure? Or would you leverage the existing infrastructure for handling such questions and close it with the appropriate reason knowing that any improvements they make will bring the question to the reopen queue? Would your response be different for users with 101 rep (i.e. users that have participated on some other Q&A site)? What about 500+ rep?



>4. A very popular, trivial question is posted (something like: "Why don't Segways have seats?"). It receives a lot of votes and answers and generates a large degree of comments and discussions. It has clearly been linked to from an external source and is bringing in lots of new users, some are leaving clearly useless answers ("I like this question!") and others are leaving brief, subjective answers ("I think it is because it looks nicer that way"). It also has answers from existing site members with good reputations and include citations and well though-out reasoning. It was posted overnight when you weren't available, and you only see this when you first visit the site in the morning. This post gets flagged as being off topic by several users, and you are pretty sure it is off topic for the site (it's not really about User Experience, it's more of a "Hmm, what's the deal with this thing not being how I want it to be" question). How would you deal with this situation?



>5. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?



>6. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?



>7. In your opinion, what do moderators do?



>8. A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?



>9. In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?