The Stack Overflow jannies are also on strike, let's see how that's going

Who are the SO jannies?

SO's model gives users more power the more reputation (points) they have. Reputation is gained by upvotes on questions and answers. For example if you have 5k reputation then you're given the "privilege" of looking at posts that have been flagged as spam/low quality/duplicate. Any post with enough downvotes will be automatically hidden, so the site is effectively self-moderating.

But every system needs a hierarchy, so at the top (below the paid admins) are jannies who have to be elected by users in an annual election process. Any user can apply to be a mod but you're unlikely to be successful if you haven't already put in hundreds of hours of tedious queue clearing work. Elected jannies are given extra powers such as:

Moderator votes are binding. Any place we have voting — close, open, delete, undelete, offensive, migration, etc. — that vote will reach the threshold and take effect immediately if a single moderator casts a vote.

and

Moderators can place users in timed suspension, and delete users if necessary.

Most SO users will never interact with an SO jannie. Jannies tend not to ask or answer questions. Super-active jannie Zoe hasn't participated in an SO question thread in over two years.

So if they're neither seen nor heard and don't appear in question threads then what exactly do they do?

Meta nonsense

Let's be clear here, Stack Overflow is an extraordinarily simple concept in which people ask and answer coding questions. As we've already established then it moderates itself. So what do the mods do? Enter meta.stackoverflow.com.

Jannies like to do things such as asking and answering obvious meta questions themselves: Why was the [google-domains] tag removed? (answer: because Google Domains shut down and it's not related to programming anyway).

Recently the jannies went "on strike" because the admins said they couldn't use AI tools to automatically ban users who they suspect to be using AI to create content. However they're not really on strike, if anything they're more active than ever, just entirely contained within Meta.

They like to complain about every little decision that the admins make, such as recently flipping a shit about a small stylistic change to the upvote/downvote buttons. Their current favourite topic is the strike:

• What is the impact of the moderation strike?

• Moderation strike: how is the discussion going between the moderators and Stack Overflow, Inc?

These threads are full of mods with "on strike" in their usernames, constantly active and constantly discussing the strike as though it's a life-or-death issue.

Meanwhile SO itself continues as per usual and its millions of daily users notice no change whatsoever. Long may they strike.