But I know it's hard to drum up sympathy for mods (or HOA boards).
How is that "clearly"?
What evidence do you have that lets you assert that I was "clearly unsuitable"?
If anything, someone like yourself who makes up bullshit and believes it as if it were established fact is the sort they should be trying to avoid allowing to moderate. Which is why I'm guessing you're actually a mod.
These reasons should have been communicated to you. If not, then clearly something went wrong somewhere.
Ah yes, the "trust us, our secret proceedings against defendants are always highly-principled and just" argument.
How can I argue with that? You've won our debate so convincingly that I must stop and crawl away in shame.
These individuals are mostly doing things like stoping fights in comments, locking (not closing) posts that have debates on them, and investigating vote collusion so that people can't boost their rep from an alt (or coworker or spouse). On smaller sites (not everything is Stack Overflow) moderators are often involved in guiding new users as you can read all the posts from a day in a few minutes - for example Academia gets about 7 questions per day (Stack Overflow gets that many each minute). They also often run anti-spam tools.
Most actions that close questions (especially as duplicates), edit posts, ask questions in comments are from other community users (not moderators) who have rep from contributing to the site. Again, these are not moderators. Some members of the community have more of an interest to curate it to fit their ideal of what the site should look like (and that's a debate that goes back a long way).
It is the diamond moderatos who are going on strike. Some of the community are also further abstaining from doing things (answering questions, closing questions, doing reviews).
So the claim that it is the moderators that are going through and checking things and insisting that they are of the right form is misplaced. Moderators are rarely involved in dealing with the quality or content of a post unless that is brought to their attention by other users and there is a substantial problem with it (e.g. the person is posting with every variable name as a vulgarity and rolling back any attempts to edit it).
The number of moderators on Stack Overflow (and the rest of Stack Exchange) is significantly less than those on Reddit and the standards that they are held to are much higher, the tools that they are given are much more powerful, and the expectations of their conduct is also much higher than Reddit.
I have zero capability of causing them real trouble, and they therefor have zero interest in correcting anything.
Likely, few people have non-zero capability when it comes to causing them trouble.
> and the standards that they are held to are much higher,
I've seen no evidence of that.
If you see a diamond moderator violating anything described in that contact Stack Overflow (the company). There are serious repercussions for a moderator violating that.
Note that this only applies to moderators - those users who have a diamond following their name. Other users are not moderators (and this is one of the sources of frequent confusion - terming anyone who can vote to close a question as a moderator).
And yet they find it so thrilling when they're measuring the grass on your front lawn with a ruler even though they live in the same neighborhood as you and know that it's rained every day for the past two fucking weeks without even 24 hours in between for it to dry up enough to push the damned mower through it.