Was away for a while. I hope you're all doing well.
Also TIL, could we as a team look over the mod applications and make decisions as a group?
If you think you can find a good mod, yes.
Here's how I vet mods and I'd like you to build on it: click their profiles and get an idea about them. What I do is read several pages of their comments and their submissions to know what kind of people they are. I've received many mod applications in the past, and I've excluded many, because of posts that are:
Childish (I want mature people).
Stupid (e.g. someone whose posts are focused on trivial, worthless things like correcting people's typos, or arguing about body functions for hours).
Antagonistic. I want positive people, not those who enjoy fighting and arguing. A lot of negative-karma posts is a red flag. A history full of sarcasm, bitterness and insults, stay away from those.
Pay attention to this one! This might sound weird, but it's actually quite important: I ALWAYS exclude those with nothing but short posts. It's a sign of shallowness and ignorance. I found some people with good qualities, but their comments are rarely more than 1-2 lines, and simplistic; they could all fit as tweets. I think the more well-read, more knowledgeable and more, ahem, intelligent the mods are, the better. Someone who can't articulate their thoughts and relies on dumb internet cliches to express his/her opinions (e.g. memes, "u mad bro", "k", "salty", "who hurt you", etc.) is the plague itself AFAIC. Someone with a lot of long, articulate posts is someone I'd be interested in.
Now, this sub is not political, but I've come to the conclusion that I want absolutely NO ONE who is a poster in the_donald. They're toxic. Their traits and characters are too negative, too troublesome and too immature to be a part of this mod team.
Relevantly, I don't want any zealous bigots, people whose post history is hatefully anti-black/anti-Hispanic/anti-Islamic/etc. They can post their opinions in the comments all they like, but I don't want them making decisions here.
I know this is time consuming and could be tedious, but I care about the quality of this sub, and it's also important for me that we get along and have good relations with each other. So this vetting process is really worth the time and effort. Also, please add more selection criteria if you know any.