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rep_level level                        median_next_post median_next_edit
--------- ---------------------------- ---------------- ---------------- 
    5     participate in meta          13 hours         70 hours
   10     remove new user restrictions 11               63
   15     vote up                       8               53
   20     talk in chat                  8               48
   50     comment everywhere            6               33
   75     set bounties                  6               26
  100     edit community wiki           5               25
  125     vote down                     5               23
  250     view close votes              4               19
  500     access review queues*         2                3
 1000     established user              3               13
 1500     create tags                   5               13
 2000     edit questions and answers    4                8
 2500     create tag synonyms           3                8
 3000     cast close and reopen votes   4                6
 5000     approve tag wiki edits        4                6
10000     access to moderator tools     6                5
15000     protect questions             9               12
20000     trusted user                 10               15

I estimated enthusiasm following a privilege level by doing a longitudinal study of median time-to-next-action. Looking at the 868 Stack Overflow users with more than 20k whose accounts were created after 2010-10-05 (the date privilege notifications were first issued), we can see how quickly they posted and edited after gaining each new privilege:

_{^* The access to First Post and Late Answer review queues is an outlier because it was introduced around August, 2013. It’s a good guess that most of these users got notified of their new privilege when they had far more than 500 reputation.}

I estimated enthusiasm following a privilege level by doing a longitudinal study of median time-to-next-action. Looking at the 868 Stack Overflow users with more than 20k whose accounts were created after 2010-10-05 (the date privilege notifications were first issued), we can see how quickly they posted and edited after gaining each new privilege:

_{^* The access to First Post and Late Answer review queues is an outlier because it was introduced around August, 2013. It’s a good guess that most of these users got notified of their new privilege when they had far more than 500 reputation.}

I'm suggesting these privileges because comments are one of the few things that elected and appointed diamond moderators can do something about that the rest of the community cannot. Other than flagging, there's no way for regular users to fix problems with the comments on a post. Having a powerful privilege to aspire to provides a better incentive than providing somewhat less-powerful privileges. Anecdotally, people most look forward to the 10k privileges which introduces the final piece of community moderation: post deletion.

These are exceptional users, so they participate (as a group) far more than others. If we look at users with more than 5 reputation, the median first post after getting participate on meta is 215 hours. Compared to their later behavior, trusted users start slow. Notice that they also slow down again after hitting 10k or so. Critically, the slow down after 10k also occurs for 30k users (N=429), so it’s not just an artifact of the cutoff.

There’s circumstantial evidence that increasing the top privilege level increased participation at higher levels. More to the point, the relatively underpowered 15k and 20k levels appear to be less effective at motivating users than 10k powers. So introducing something really helpful, such as comment moderation, seems in order.

However, I think comment moderation is mostly a waste of time. I'd much rather let the system handle comments. Unfortunately, there are already so many comments that should have been edits (or even answers) instead that we can't blindly hide/delete old comments. Creating this privilege will mean committing to manual comment moderation for the foreseeable future. Comment moderation is tedious and unrewarding so I'd rather have our top users do something more productive with their time.

I'm suggesting these privileges because comments are one of the few things that elected and appointed diamond moderators can do something about that the rest of the community cannot. Other than flagging, there's no way for regular users to fix problems with the comments on a post. Having a powerful privilege to aspire to provides a better incentive than providing somewhat less-powerful privileges. Anecdotally, people most look forward to the 10k privileges which introduces the final piece of community moderation: post deletion.

These are exceptional users, so they participate (as a group) far more than others. If we look at users with more than 5 reputation, the median first post after getting participate on meta is 215 hours. Compared to their later behavior, trusted users start slow. Notice that they also slow down again after hitting 10k or so. Critically, the slow down after 10k also occurs for 30k users (N=429), so it’s not just an artifact of the cutoff.

There’s circumstantial evidence that increasing the top privilege level increased participation at higher levels. More to the point, the relatively underpowered 15k and 20k levels appear to be less effective at motivating users than 10k powers. So introducing something really helpful, such as comment moderation, seems in order.

However, I think comment moderation is mostly a waste of time. I'd much rather let the system handle comments. Unfortunately, there are already so many comments that should have been edits (or even answers) instead that we can't blindly hide/delete old comments. Creating this privilege will mean committing to manual comment moderation for the foreseeable future. Comment moderation is tedious and unrewarding so I'd rather have our top users do something more productive with their time.