I do see what you are saying, but there would need to be organization restructure in communities and on the site. Let me explain:

For the sole discussion of moderator abuse on leaderboards, i have experienced this first-hand when I used to moderate subway surfers as a super mod. A verifier (with standard mod status) claimed world record in a highly coveted category, only for myself to retime the run to find it was actually third place, and also a self verification. They were put on probation for violating our internal moderation rules (which were actually quite strict, and I dont think people realized that).

Your proposal would potentially have prevented that; however, out of the 28ish users on the mod team at that time, only 3 users had ever played the game. There would be no point to separate out categories for 3 users, and they were held to the same standard as world records claims (a much higher standard than your average joe runner). Most people would say that it would be crazy to have 25 runners who have never touched the game outside of some casual playthroughs to moderate a leaderboard, but truth is (in agreement with your position), its not hard to coach new mods on various techniques in a run, what to look for, and how to check for various forms of cheating.

Most communities on the site, like @hahhah42 said, are very small and are just "for fun" and dont function as a structured organization. Those that do are usually poorly structured from not the best fit mods for the position.

If im not misunderstanding, it seems you want leaderboards to carry themselves more professionally, which i agree with you on that, but that would take an entire culture shift on sr.c for that to happen.

"mod only leaderboards" is the dumbest thing ive heard and i didnt read the original post.

one reason there are multiple mods on games is that the other mods can verify the other mods runs so unless the community is small and there is only one mod they wont be verifying their own runs.

Moderators aren't really judges, they're just maintaining the leaderboard on behalf of the game's community. Their main role is just to keep the leaderboard accurate and up to date per the community's wishes. They do have the power to reject runs, but verification mostly just exists to ensure accuracy and mitigate spam/blatantly fake stuff, realistically any kind of advanced cheating isn't gonna get caught on a first verification pass anyway. There is technically a conflict of interest, but the chance of that leading to an actual problem are pretty slim given how obvious it would be to the community, and even in those cases you simply have to escalate the issue to site staff, who can and will give people the boot if they're not doing their job correctly. The "Jimmy would never do that" argument can also happen with highly reputable non-moderators, so that hardly seems relevant, and frankly I have never seen strong proof of cheating be ignored for that reason.

Ultimately, the people that will care the most about the leaderboard for a particular game being accurate and up to date are people who actually run the game. Having the people running the leaderboards people who don't have a vested interest in things has its own whole set of huge problems, particularly for smaller/less popular games. That was basically how SDA worked back in the day and people were largely unhappy with that situation. Things are generally better this way.

This is the funniest post I have seen on the speedrun.com forum in years

I am Xar,

And I completely agree that the people who in most cases care quite a bit for the game, are very involved in the community, and are sometimes quite good at the game shouldn't be allowed to submit runs to it. Being good at the game is definitely due to the fact that they have secret moderator information and don't have proper verification for themselves, it would be ridiculous to suggest that it is because of all the time and effort they put in. Personally I think everyone would still spend lots of their time moderating boards for free if they were unable to run the game themselves.

An interesting proposal from the thread creator. But highly impractical for the wide range of speedrun communities in my opinion.

Writing down some of my thoughts:

1. There is no money / benefits in speedrunning available to pay an independent mod system on the implemented scale at SRC.
2. On some leaderboards there might be space to establish mod-only & non-mod leaderboards. But many games have so many categories which would make it a mess. (Especially leaderboards which are already a mess.) You could also introduce variables telling you if it was submitted by a mod. Maybe a bit less messy, but still extra effort to maintain on the boards.
3. Also how does one count a run which was done by a runner when he was still a mod, but quit being a mod after? Or the other way around: a "common" runner becoming mod after. How can you be sure that somebody doesn't just create an alternative account to avoid the limitations for mods?
4. Many games are very inactive. Current SRC policy about a pending run is that if mods are not responding within a given time the runner gets to request mod-status to verify it themselves. That would need to be changed somehow as the runner suddenly is the mod. Which leaderboard shall it be? Runner-board or mod-board or suddenly not allowed to have a run on the board?
5. Points 1-4 are the reason I say this is highly impractical. I don't see a path for implementation in the next years. Not unless the speedrun communities have a drastic change of mind.
6. In most games I run mods are one of the most engaging people of the community. I have yet to encounter one that is keeping secrets. Usually it is the other way around: mods are happy to share their knowledge of the game. Or maybe I and/or these communities I'm familiar with just haven't found their secrets yet.
7. It is not weird to me that mods usually occupy top places on leaderboards. The people who care very much about the game & carry a lot of knowledge about it will usually do quite good in runs and invest a lot of time in runs. They might lack other skills like dexterity if the game requires it, but not all do.
8. It probably not so surprising that most people that reply to this thread are mods in 1 or more games. Somebody can probably give some statistics for that. I suspect mods are in general more active on the SRC forums as they have to come to the site more often anyways to do mod-duties.
9. Would I be interested in having independent mods in my speed-games? Hell YEAH! It would be cool. I'd happily resign from my mod-duties and not do that unpaid job. I can watch the runs then of my own will and not try to analyze them for suspicious content. But as pointed out in 5. --> I just can't see that happening any time soon.

A bit off-topic: I recently discussed with my brother the use of AI to assist in finding cheaters in speedruns. AI could try to learn what is suspicious and point out those parts to the mods. I rate that more realistically than this thread's topic.

lmao OP deleted their whole account over this

Hilarious lol he just refused to listen to everyone! We all kept trying to explain things to him, but he just kept repeating himself over and over! I guess he got tired of being told what he was wrong about!

Being good at the game is definitely due to the fact that they have secret moderator information