> I don't think that was a decision made by the mods, I think that's policy created by SO.
There was little to no direction from the top, at least at that time. Mods were just self-appointed community members who organized in such a way to impose their will on the community. It was pretty classic tyranny of the minority. Many of the more prolific contributors (of which I was one at the time) were deeply frustrated by this. It was a frequent topic on Meta SO.
You saw these waves of subtle policy changes if you tracked edits to your contributions. Suddenly there'd be a bunch of edits all based on some new formatting policy and a lot of it was just pointless busywork.
Some people just fall into this trap of elevating the process to where the process becomes a goal and is treated of equal (or even higher) value to the content it's applied to. Moderation is important and has a place but, left to their own devices, moderators will create work for themselves just based on their idle capacity. You need to avoid this.
There was little to no direction from the top, at least at that time. Mods were just self-appointed community members who organized in such a way to impose their will on the community. It was pretty classic tyranny of the minority. Many of the more prolific contributors (of which I was one at the time) were deeply frustrated by this. It was a frequent topic on Meta SO.
You saw these waves of subtle policy changes if you tracked edits to your contributions. Suddenly there'd be a bunch of edits all based on some new formatting policy and a lot of it was just pointless busywork.
Some people just fall into this trap of elevating the process to where the process becomes a goal and is treated of equal (or even higher) value to the content it's applied to. Moderation is important and has a place but, left to their own devices, moderators will create work for themselves just based on their idle capacity. You need to avoid this.