I want to respond to a comment, but I feel the response is more generally applicable.

Insisting content creation is necessary to validate if someone is capable of using a privilege, is a model we want to move away from. It may have gotten us here but that doesn't mean it's a good model.

I actually roughly agree: the ability (and desire) to moderate is distinct from the ability to write good content, and it might not be the best idea to have content creation be the (only) criterion for moderation, as is currently the case.

However, what you're proposing here is to completely remove the criterion and not replacing it by anything.

So the question this experiment tries to answer is: "is this criterion better than no criterion". I doubt this is the case (at least not on sites that are already struggling with quality control... which is most sites I've used). Creating some good content (or at least positively-received content) seems unlikely to be a net-negative criterion for being able to judge what good content looks like, even if it isn't a good criterion.

The better question to try to answer is: "is this criterion better than some other criterion". This experiment would only give us information about that if our current criterion is actively harmful.

A better criterion might be to somehow "educate users on what to upvote, what to downvote and what not to upvote or downvote" (and possibly also including a test to make sure they actually read any of that and understand it).

I suppose we might also have different priorities when it comes to judging what's "good". You seem to be largely/primarily motivated by the "hope to spur participation and engagement", whereas I care more about retaining and improving quality, even if that means limiting participation.

On that note, you seem (for a long time now) to be moving away from the model of a limited number of users creating a Q&A to be passively used by a large number of users, and moving more towards trying to maximise the number and degree of engagement of active participants. There are already many, many sites focusing on the latter, but quite few focusing on the former.

I suppose the question is also then how you'd judge the results. If there's a slight decrease in quality, but there are more votes, would that be considered a success?

As a side note: the score of a post could skew people's perspective on the quality of that post. It's not inconceivable that people think quality improved simply as a result of new users upvoting things more and there thus being fewer negatively-scored posts. I'm not sure it's even possible to avoid that, without making people aware of their potential bias ahead of time (but that creates other problems).

I want to respond to a comment, but I feel the response is more generally applicable.

Insisting content creation is necessary to validate if someone is capable of using a privilege, is a model we want to move away from. It may have gotten us here but that doesn't mean it's a good model.

I actually roughly agree: the ability (and desire) to moderate is distinct from the ability to write good content, and it might not be the best idea to have content creation be the (only) criterion for moderation, as is currently the case.

However, what you're proposing here is to completely remove the criterion and not replacing it by anything.

So the question this experiment tries to answer is: "is this criterion better or worse than no criterion". I doubt that it's worse (at least on sites that are already struggling with quality control... which is most sites I've used). Creating some good content (or at least positively-received content) seems unlikely to be a net-negative criterion for being able to judge what good content looks like, even if it isn't a good criterion.

The better question to try to answer is: "is this criterion better or worse than some other criterion". This experiment would only give us information about that if our current criterion is actively harmful, which would make it worse than any criterion that provides any benefit whatsoever. But if it provides some benefit (however small), this wouldn't tell us how it compares to other possible criteria.

A better criterion might be to somehow "educate users on what to upvote, what to downvote and what not to upvote or downvote" (and possibly also including a test to make sure they actually read any of that and understand it).

I suppose we might also have different priorities when it comes to judging what's "good". You seem to be largely/primarily motivated by the "hope to spur participation and engagement", whereas I care more about retaining and improving quality, even if that means limiting participation.

On that note, you seem (for a long time now) to be moving away from the model of a limited number of users creating a Q&A to be passively used by a large number of users, and moving more towards trying to maximise the number and degree of engagement of active participants. There are already many, many sites focusing on the latter, but quite few focusing on the former.

I suppose the question is also then how you'd judge the results. If there's a slight decrease in quality, but there are more votes, would that be considered a success?

As a side note: the score of a post could skew people's perspective on the quality of that post. It's not inconceivable that people think quality improved simply as a result of new users upvoting things more and there thus being fewer negatively-scored posts. I'm not sure it's even possible to avoid that, without making people aware of their potential bias ahead of time (but that creates other problems).