The vast,vast majority of mods do not fall into the behavior you're describing, making it largely a non-issue. In a practical standpoint, there isn't an alternative even if it was desirable. We would be hard pressed to find people willing to, free of charge, moderate the tens of thousands of different games and verify runs if those people did not have in interest in the speedrun for that game.
On most large boards (that actually have a good repuation), there are generally internal rules in place for who can verify who's runs (sometimes bots do this). This typically means no self-verification (and some boards super mods just dont verify at all, they have different responsibilities) and elimiates some of the bias you mentioned.
As for smaller leaderboards, it just doesnt make sense in most cases to have more than 1 moderator. They most likely will run the game, since in most cases, you can be a better run moderator when you have strong game knowledge.
For what you are referring to, this just sounds like a toxic community that has been established for a long period of time. These communities usually exist for older speedgames, and usually fragment with time. I have personally seen this go so far as to all category world record holders removing all their runs to protest a moderation team, and while sad, these extreme acts are usually what it takes to rebuild a community.
No one would mod if that was the case... because then they couldn't run the game.
Anyone who would mod, would know comparatively little about speedrunning the game, if... they never speedran the game.
The reason most (particularly all the many small unpopular boards) have a moderator in the top 3, is because they were one of the few people who cared enough about the game to grind it down to a top 3 time, and also take the time to set up and moderate a board (an enormous time sink that takes away from other fun things like speedrunning, or basically anything else). When those people go inactive and next person actually runs, they try to beat the best times, and when mods go inactive and no one can mod a game, whoever is trying to submit a run to that game generally ends up as mod.
Anyone, whether they moderate or have ever even played that game at all, can examine all the same things about a run to examine them if they are suspect. Mods who have acted nefariously in the past generally get banned from the site, or removed as moderator at the very least.
@odious you're missing 1 major thing! Moderators are not "Judges"! The term "judges" don't even fit in this situation. The moderators don't "judge" runs. They look at runs to see if they're legit or not, they check for discrepancies in speedrunning submissions. Judging is something totally different.
"You know, you did pretty good, you should be 2nd place", probably a bad example but that's not what speedrunning moderators do.
Also it absolutely makes no sense that a Moderator can't speedrun the game that they moderate. Everyone is allowed to speedrun whatever they want. And just because someone is a mod, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have more knowledge on a game, or are better at a game. 1 can learn more about a game, discover more, and even improve their skills beyond a Moderator's! Improvement is a thing you know.
We shouldn't be forced to limit ourselves to what we speedrun just because of moderation. There's really no difference between a Moderator and a speedrunner. A the end of the day, we're all still the same, we're all speedrunners, speedrunning games we find interesting. There's really no difference between a Moderator and a speedrunner.
Well it seems to me Odious that you're just gonna argue with what everyone tells you no matter what, even after explaining things to you multiple times. But I guess you think what you want, have a nice day!
if u wanna propose something as big as this at least make structured but anyways im sorry if i missed anything u said.
Okay so your idea to incentivize becoming a moderator is this right
there are ways to incentivize becoming a moderator without having to pay, moderator rewards, contests for mods or a mods leaderboard, etc.
Lets expand on that idea. What rewards would u be offering for moderators if not money? what kind of contests would be good for moderators ? do u really think most people would be interested in that ?
you could have MOD ONLY leaderboards, you could stop being a MOD if you want to run on public boards. You guys have high dollar contests too, now why couldn't you have those JUST FOR MODs as well?
99.9% of games dont have contests with big or any prizes. It's even VERY rare for popular games. Even if there are, the people who gives the money would want as many people as possible to compete. Prized contests for mods only is a 100% bad idea and would break the community, not that anyone would be dumb enough to do it (or maybe someone have too much money lol)
It's normal to have people who judge compete on the same leaderboards. You can find examples of this in chess and speedcubing, go out and find irl tournaments and u will find that competitors be judges all the time! Maybe not in the highest level tournaments but thats not comparable to any speedgame. There are a lot of arguments to made to counter your idea because it's simply a terrible idea. But i dont want to waste anymore time.
I think your main concern is about unfair advantages that mods (supposedly) have, we can classify it into 2 advantages :
- Not In-game
Mods can really influence what rules gets enforced and other things outside of the game that give adventages to themselves. This is a valid point since they do have the power to do that. For games that have a community (more than just a few people) this is a non issue since the majority will decide that instead of the mods most of the time. If there are unfair advantages, the mods are corrupt, etc. then the community will do something about it no doubt (it can get super complicated if its like 50/50 split and stuff but thats rare). However i can see it being a problem with very small communities. I'm not experienced enough to say i know whats going in those games with 1-5 people running but im pretty sure u can do something about it that doesnt involve making big changes.
- In-game
Moderators also keep a large amount of things they learn secret, which is understandable, this way they have an edge when trying to find out whether a player is cheating or not.
This is what you said but i dont think this is not common at all. I'm guessing this is just your imagination and it makes sense for u so u said it. Please give actual examples or this point is simply irrelevant.
It might be true that there are things about a game that moderators do not disclose to catch cheaters. But those things are not an advantage for them in anyway except if the moderators also wants to cheat. But how common is it really? also if the mods have their own leaderboards whats stopping them to do that in their leaderboard ? most people will just not recognise mods leaderboards as a legitimate thing and the mods would have no incentive to compete in that leaderboard because what makes competing in a leaderboard worth it is that people acknowledge that the leaderboard is legit. In that case, its no different than having no leaderboards.
In any case, banning moderators to be able to compete in the same leaderboards as everyone else doesnt solve anything, it would create infinitely more problems, and it would be a non trivial task to implement. It will never happen so please calm down and think about it again. If there are specific problems that youre experiencing then tell people about it, it rarely needs a sitewide solution.
I won't be replying to your response unless u make like a whole ass thesis because this is simply a dumb idea that's not worth discussing, have a nice day.
Odious, I think you're underestimating just how many of the leaderboards on this site are simply too small to attract random non-runners who'd be interested & dedicated to moderating those games. Over 75% of the over 36,000 leaderboards on this site have no more than 12 runners. That's >27,000 games. So even though those leaderboards are very small, your proposal would cumulatively inconvenience tens of thousands of runners by effectively disabling their leaderboards (not to mention preventing most new leaderboards from being added).
Another thing you might want to consider is that if the larger communities wanted to have a "mods can't be runners" policy, they could implement that on their own. The fact that they haven't done so suggests most communities, by and large, are not in favor of such a policy.
So if SRC were to implement your proposal, either by removing mod status from those who have runs or by removing the runs from moderators, it's likely that many of the largest communities would protest this, and some would make their own sites to be the new primary leaderboard for the game (if an alternate site doesn't already exist). This is already the case for certain games for historical reasons.
Anyway, I have in fact run some games with moderators who had no runs in the game at the time, and my experience is that those leaderboards tend to be less well maintained than leaderboards moderated by runners. To the extent that I view non-runners moderating a game as a red flag for likely moderation issues, at least in the small games I tend to favor.