> That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.

If quite literally every person I interact with professionally has an anecdote about this happening, your anecdote about it not happening is not very convincing.

Have you/SO staff/SO mods considered why this impression is so prevalent if you’re confident it’s (as you claim) not actually true?

Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me.

I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.