Forgive me for shooting from the hip. These are just a few (mostly complete) thoughts.
A short note on personal attacks. From time to time people have disagreements with each other and the staff. While this goes along with being a part of a very diverse group of people, it shouldn't necessarily have to take on a personal nature. Common courtesy should be just that—common. Disagree all you want with someone but please remember to maintain a reasonable level of civility. Personal attacks in the catbox are petty, plain and simple.
On nuking policy, I feel it's worth mentioning that the staff are editors, not graders. There is no set of criteria a writeup must fulfill in order to be nuked nor can a writeup become immune to being nuked through gaining votes or C!s. Though those are used as a guideline they are not the final word on a writeup's survival. It is all left up to the individual editor's discretion and in general we respect one another's decisions. However, if you would like to appeal a deletion, feel free to take it up with a different editor privately. Bear in mind that publicly engaging an editor usually comes off as throwing a tantrum (whether deservedly or not) and in general causes a lot of needless drama. Civility, discretion, wa.
Some want to blame editorial policy for the drop off of activity in recent years but I think it's a minor cause that misses the point. An archaic user interface, a growing plethora of other sites which compete for the same demographic, and a change in how people view the internet in their lives are all a much larger aspect of E2's membership decline. It is not a lack or excess of rigor on the editor's part so much as the fact that fewer new users are signing up (the Site Trajectory is somewhat concerning). As far as priorities, I'd say that those I'd mentioned above are much more important than infighting about editorial policy.
Finally, I have noticed that (especially recently) there has been a lack of communication from the E2 staff. Because we tend to do most of our work through private messages, there often is little record of what we do which can create the feeling that we're hiding things that should be public. The fact that what we do is for the most part banal and mundane makes it easy for us to omit important communication. Considering the number of Ed Logs that have been made in the past few months, I'd say that the majority us are guilty of it and (buzzword alert) a little more transparency wouldn't hurt. So, with that in mind, I will make a log of all the writeups that I nuke along with a brief explanation of why and then post the list at the end of the month.
Seacrest out.