Farewell fellow visitors: Dan Hulme retires as moderator

Question

I'm writing to you today to let you all know I'll be stepping down from the post of moderator, effective when the (newly announced) election happens. When I first joined this site, it was not just a hobby for me, but a professional interest, as a developer of Android apps and games, and of the OS itself. I hoped to reach out to my own users, and to help bring the deep knowledge of Android to everyone here, to solve the questions that can only be answered as a developer.

But now it's two years since I last worked on Android as a developer, and though I still use an Android phone, I'm not as active on the site as I was, and I don't have that interest to research those hard technical questions. The site's just not the same part of my daily routine that it used to be. We were due for an election anyway, so it seems like the right time for me to step back from moderation duties and encourage some new input from those who are more active on the site now.

I'll still pop in on the review queues occasionally, but I won't be casting the final vote any more. I hope you all continue to encourage asking and answering technical questions when they're of interest to non-developers, as well as the more everyday "I flashed my phone and it won't boot any more" troubleshooting.

Thanks to all those who originally elected me, and I hope you'll remember to vote in the upcoming election. Chatting with moderators on other sites really made me appreciate how friendly and drama-free our community is. We have some good people who I'm sure will become great moderators.

Answer 1

Thanks a lot Dan for your work as a Moderator and as a learned and a trusted user of this site. While I find your answers truly insightful and inspiring (one of those answers which actually inspired me to start contributing to this site), I equally appreciate your work as a Moderator.

I was one of the candidates running up for elections back in 2016, and while I lost and kind of felt bad because I lost to you (a momentary emotion, usual to mortals; and Izzy was sure to win anyway, so I was competing with you mostly :D), I gradually realized that the community chose a much better person as a Moderator than what I could be back than.

You brought to the table the kind of patience as a Moderator I didn't know in person. (I think I failed to witness that in other Mods before 2016 was mostly because earlier the Mods were understaffed and under heavy janitorial work load so exercising that much patience might have been detrimental to the site, so they did what they thought was best for the site which I appreciate equally).

You started salvaging those borderline developer-cum-end-user oriented questions which I et al hastily thought would be closed as off-topic. One of the distinct trait I noted was that you often let the community decide what to do with questions which introduced ambiguity when deciding the scope of the concerned questions. Furthermore, unless somebody else responded first, you (Izzy too) always remained in site's room, welcomed the visitors as a host and guided them gently.

My personal interaction with you further strengthened my respect for you as a Moderator, especially when I brought to Mods' concern issues which were somewhat unhealthy to the community, and which sometimes I brought with emotions leading to indiscreet engagement. But, you always exercised that basic trait of a Moderator to remain cool, see the facts as it is, and never misuse or abuse the power no matter if it solves the problem in the short run.

I'm not good with memory so that's what I could recall. That been said, thank you again Dan for helping us fellow users, along with our other hard working Moderators, to focus on that which matters most to us (asking quality questions and answering insightful answers)