Just to clarify, nobody appointed me of anything. It's just that I was the only one to take the time to do it regularly, and happened to do it before anyone else because of my geographical position. It became sort of a custom, just that. I do not object however if someone else wants to do it and beats me earlier, although I would prefer two threads not to overlap.

So only MrMind is allowed to create open threads? Who gave him this sole authority? When was this decided by the community?

"Allowed" suggests something different then I said. I suggest that there's a norm and it's worthwhile to downvote people for breaking that norm without good reason.

In the absence of such a norm you get multiple people competing to start the open thread to gather karma and that's bad. We also had discussions about who opens the open thread in the past, but at the moment I don't want to run the search to dig them up.

Since I'm based in Italy, it seemed a good compromise between the Australian early risers and the American late risers :)

Also, it looks like the timestamps on comments and posts are in UTC, so it makes sense that open threads would "expire" at midnight UTC and a new one is created soon thereafter.