What can an SE participant do when s/he feels personally attacked by a specific moderator?
I am posing this question, and will be answering it myself, based on my own experience, in the hopes that it will benefit others who might at some point experience what I described. (Hint: there's a happy ending coming.)
I'm going to quote from your answer:
Ready for the happy ending? The SE Team member, as a neutral third party, was able to look at the situation objectively, recognize my good intentions and my willingness to continue to learn and improve my effectiveness as a SE participant, and have a respectfully critical talk with the moderator I was in so much conflict with.
I'm glad you see this as a happy ending and I certainly don't want to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But I feel compelled to offer a slightly different view of what happened since I was the person who responded to your team@ messages. Your good intentions, which are certainly commendable, really didn't have anything to do with how this situation was resolved. You can read the the thoughts of two of our moderators as answers to Was this edit handled appropriately?
The very specific thing I talked with the moderators about was why the answer had been locked. After talking it over, we agreed the answer no longer needed to be locked. Our conversations centered on what was best for the site. Once the discussion of the post had been brought up on meta and was no longer in an active rollback war, it was safe to unlock. And so it was.
Here's a portion of what I wrote to you:
I'm glad you are willing to learn and I hope you will continue to be an asset to the site. One of the best things you could do is take the time to understand the perspective of other users and consider how your vision for the site could work with theirs. Working together as a community often requires many people to accommodate the needs of others.
I feel like you haven't really understood this message yet. Just reading what you've written in your answer, it seems that you consider getting your way to be the definition of a happy ending. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get. My definition would be that the community as a whole (including yourself) worked together to find a solution. Looking at the revision history of your answer, I don't think we have arrived at that joyous state. Rather, I think we've delayed an inevitable future conflict.
On a more positive note, a third-party mediator can indeed be helpful when someone feels personally attacked by someone else. It doesn't have to be a Community Manager, however. Most conflicts on a site are best resolved on right here on Meta because it ensures that all interested parties have a voice. Carefully and honestly explaining your position on meta maximizes the odds that other people will consider your point of view.
There is a StackExchange Meta post about this: What recourse do I have if I believe a moderator has abused his/her privileges?
There are a variety of possible approaches that depend on the situation. I'd recommend going in this order:
Ask about it on meta, e.g. Why was my question closed? or I don't understand what was wrong with my answer.
Not only does this notify the other moderators that there's a potential issue, but the rest of the user community can weigh in as well. StackExchange encourages community moderation (closing, editing, voting, commenting).
If you don't want to talk about it in public, mention a moderator in the Parenting chat room and they can help set up a private chat room to discuss the problem.
I encourage those two methods. It's faster to get an answer from other moderators, who are regularly visiting the site, than from the StackExchange team, who have dozens of sites to support. It also provides an opportunity to clear up misunderstandings, provide meta or help topics that might better describe the problem, and so on.
If that doesn't feel feasible or comfortable, then:
I would suggest a looking at things rather differently. If what I am doing is not appreciated by the people charged with running some kind of activity, I try to look at my own behavior objectively and see what it is that is aggravating the situation. Maybe I don't understand the expectations of this particular environment; maybe it's just not really the right place for me.
The moderators for StackExchange sites are selected for: a) knowledge of the stack exchange environment, b) knowledge of the specific topic area they are going to be moderating, and c) ability to work amiably and productively with users from a wide variety of backgrounds and personalities. This does not make them infallible, but it does suggest that they probably understand how things are supposed to work around here better than I do. A disagreement with a moderator is unlikely to be caused by personal animus.
Moreover, I doubt that individual moderators make significant decisions unilaterally. I know from experience helping to run other groups and interactive Web sites that decisions, particularly ones involving well-meaning people who nevertheless aren't quite fitting into the environment, are typically taken in concert. If I had concerns about how I was being treated, it would make the most sense to contact one or two of the other moderators for the same StackExchange site. These people will likely already be familiar with the goings-on involved, and if there is a serious problem, they are in the best position to deal with it promptly.
Of course, it hurts nothing to contact people higher up. However, I would not expect them to give a moderator a stern lecture. If you feel that doing this helped your situation, I can't argue with that, but bringing in more senior people is not always going to get things resolved with a "win" for the complainant.
I tried a lot of things that didn't work. Flagging, defending myself, patiently explaining my point of view ad nauseum, request that the other moderators in the same SE site take a look at the contentious exchanges, bringing up problems in Meta, going to Chat, rolling back to my own answer text when I felt over-edited, showing my respect and appreciation for certain aspects of the person's work, requesting that the site moderators bump the disagreement up to a higher power. None of those things helped in the slightest.
Here's what did help: I hit the "contact us" link at the bottom of the page, and laid out my point of view in a respectful tone, but with honesty.
Apparently, what this accomplished was to get a problem escalated -- which I had not succeeded in accomplishing by any other means.
The first response from the SE Team showed pretty clearly that the team member hadn't looked at the situation very closely. But the system allowed me to write back. I provided a couple of specific links that I thought illustrated my points clearly.
Ready for the happy ending? The SE Team member, as a neutral third party, was able to look at the situation objectively, recognize my good intentions and my willingness to continue to learn and improve my effectiveness as a SE participant, and have a respectfully critical talk with the moderator I was in so much conflict with.
Sometimes two people push each other's buttons. It doesn't mean either of them is a bad person, or that they'll never be able to get along. But it can be helpful for someone completely unconnected with either party to take an objective look at the situation.
I am writing this not with the view of further embarrassing myself, and certainly not with the goal of embarrassing anyone else, but to document an approach that works.
I only wish I had figured out this approach earlier, before things got so polarized.
This site has a lot to offer, and hopefully there is room for lots of different parenting styles, writing styles, and human being styles.
