I only happened to be appointed a moderator because I was in the list of top 10 posters at a particular time, and I don't feel like I should have any particular authority to make the rules.
You are selling yourself short. The fact that you have a 94% positive karma rating counts in your favor. Being a MIRI research associate also means that you have a former affiliation which qualifies you.
But if you don't want the job, I think the straightforward way is to have a procedure where differently people volunteer to be moderators and then Eliezer as main person responsible for this website picks on of those people to transfer to them moderator powers. Preferably a person with >1000 karma and a high positive karma rating.
Preferably a person with >1000 karma and a high positive karma rating.
If you do this, you've just declared people downvoted by Eugene to be ineligible for moderator.
Since the episode with Eugine_Nier, I have received three private messages from different people asking me to investigate various cases of suspected mass downvoting. And to be quite honest, I don't want to deal with this. Eugine's case was relatively clear-cut, since he had engaged in systematic downvoting of a massive scale, but the new situations are a lot fuzzier and I'm not sure of what exactly the rules should be (what counts as a permitted use of the downvote system and what doesn't?).
At least one person has also privately contacted me and offered to carry out moderator duties if I don't want them, but even if I told them yes (on what basis? why them and not someone else?), I don't know what kind of policy I should tell them to enforce. I only happened to be appointed a moderator because I was in the list of top 10 posters at a particular time, and I don't feel like I should have any particular authority to make the rules. Nor do I feel like I have any good idea of what the rules should be, or who would be the right person to enforce them.
In any case, I don't want to be doing this job, nor do I particularly feel like being responsible for figuring out who should, or how, or what the heck. I've already started visiting LW less often because I dread having new investigation requests to deal with. So if you folks could be so kind as to figure it out without my involvement? If there's a clear consensus that someone in particular should deal with this, I can give them mod powers, or something.