- How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
I would invite him to focus on what's most important and how time and energy consuming conflicts can be. He is a great contributor and he can create a better image of himself by just avoiding flaming others.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?
I would contact the mod to understand what I might have been missing.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
Help in maintaining the topic efficient, both in terms of results quality and speed: prevent non-related content to slip in, avoid or stop flame wars, prevent unanswerable questions to appear to the user base, and so forth.
- A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
Proud but also scared: I will no longer represent only myself and my actions will reflect on people I don't even know.
- In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
In absolutely no way: it will only imply a greater responsibility.
**UPDATE
A few additional questions came up.
How would you handle this hypothetical situation? A user with less than 50 answers in 75 months continues to excessively self-promote (arduino.stackexchange.com/help/promotion) and tries to sell you his products in more than half of their answers. What would you do about it?
If the answers are on-point I see non reason why I should moderate him. On the other hand, if his answers are misinterpreting the question (either voluntarily or not) I would give him a warning. If he keeps promoting his stuff outside of the question topic I would report him for a temporary ban, possibly turned into permanent if things don't get right.
As of 2021-07-08 PST, we have 3 candidates. When I compare Juraj, sa_leinad, and Roberto Lo Giacco's profile & activity data, it's crystal clear that sa_leinad, and Roberto Lo Giacco have done very little in the past 63 months in the way of editing, flagging, and up-voting. Why, all of a sudden, do you want to be a moderator when the data shows you have not been putting in the work that will be required of you as a moderator?
This was the toughest question. I'm a busy person and I cannot guarantee I will be able to put much more time into moderating, but I thought even the additional 1% could be helpful. If it comes between me and someone else having the possibility to invest more time, then hell yeah, scratch me out and go for him/her.
I honestly have no need to become a SO moderator, but SO gave me a lot in these years so I thought I should have at least tried give back something, probably not enough, but better than nothing.
Was my thinking wrong?
Another hypothetical question. You are elected as a moderator, then you discover that one of the moderators has done practically nothing in the past 2+ years. The other moderator has handled 99% of the flags, post closures, in other words, "work". How would you feel about doing the required tasks for a moderator who refuses to do any "work", but retains his position?
I would ask the other moderator to step down and give up his position in favor of someonelse who might better help the community.