The fact that one of the moderators is pretty much inactive has been brought up many times already (e.g. this meta post from last year). In fact, he has been invited to step aside a couple of times by now, with no feedback from his side (AFAIK). I believe it is important to have a conversation about it at some point, so why not now?
Do we want this person to remain a moderator? Is there any mechanism to enforce the decision if he does not manifest any will to follow the community's wish?
Oh, wow, I hadn't realized this was going on :)
I first just wish to apologise to the community, both Chem.SE and Physics.SE, for my lack of activity. I'll shortly explain what happened, but I also just feel bad for causing this conflict, and think I could have handled this better. Sorry about that.
So a bit of background: Around 2014 I started getting involved in the Rust community, and my capacity for dealing with stuff online decreased. I also was just busier in college, and balancing my time on Stack Exchange became increasingly harder. I still spent time moderating, though.
I've always had a bit of conflict in picking between a career in software vs a career in physics -- I really like physics and picked it as a major, but I've really enjoyed programming. My opinion eventually shifted from being set on doing physics to doing software (for a complex tangle of reasons), and I eventually got a job doing Rust stuff at Mozilla.
This also meant that Being Online was a part of my job so I didn't have as much of an inclination to participate here as I used to. It also decentered physics from my life, impacting my participation similarly.
But Stack Exchange used to be a big part of my life. It was an online community I truly enjoyed, and I'd learned so much from it, both in terms of actual physics/etc as well as so many things about community dynamics. A bunch of the stuff I've learned here has been applied to the Rust community at a fundamental level, and it's overall been super helpful. So I couldn't bring myself to stop participating. Instead, I felt like I would eventually have time again, and that would be soon. Sometimes I'd drop by and moderate a couple things and check out the meta and overall be really happy that this place exists and is running smoothly. The comm team sends out these check in emails to semi inactive moderators and that would occasionally spur me into participating a bit again, but it never lasted. I recognized that this wasn't sustainable, but it always felt like "eh, I'll have more time next month".
Of course, tomorrow never comes, and I've only gotten busier over time. I still love this place to pieces, but it's just hard to find time to participate.
Honestly, moderation isn't the ideal way for me to participate anyway, as someone who isn't doing physics all the time anymore I should probably spend more time doing q&a for fun, not moderation. The reason I like moderating is that I really care about communities I care about being pleasant spaces, and I care about it enough to consider it my duty to help. But I'm not helping right now, and if I wanted to I can help quite a bit without having the diamond. There's really no reason for me to still have the diamond, it's just taken this nudge to cause the reflection necessary for me to explicitly realize that :)
So yeah, I definitely should step down. Consider this my resignation letter.
It's been fun!
I hope to eventually have time to participate again. I'll definitely be dropping by now and then.
I'll post this as an answer since it seems there's disagreements and it's important to get a feeling for folks' responses to this.
For one, I find that a particularly useful tool for gauging moderation activity is the All Actions tab on the Activity profile page, or at least a reasonably zoomed-out view of it. If you look at any given active moderator's All Actions history, you'll see a bunch of reviews, a bunch of edits, and a ton of moderation-related comments, in addition to the standard-user interactions with the site. We can't see all of a moderator's actions, since many of them (like, say, deleting obsolete comments) are designed to be invisible.
However, I would claim that if a moderator hangs out on a site in a moderatorial mood, for a few hours, then they're not going to only do those invisible actions - they're going to end up doing stuff like moving discussions to chat, fixing the tags on a post, approving an edit suggestion, or opening or closing a post here or there, which do leave a visible trace. For Manish, the last such activity dates from May 2017. While I have no trouble believing Shog9's assertion that Manish's moderatorial actions over, say, the past six months, are strictly-speaking nonzero, I am having a hard time swallowing the argument that it crosses any reasonable line drawn above 'negligible'.
And, frankly, it does feel to me that if he's not actively moderating then him having a diamond doesn't make much sense. There's a proportionality to moderator powers: they represent additional authority and powers which we give to some users because we need them to do use it. If the tools are not being used, then they should be put back in their box. There's no hard feelings about this, but I do think the position of moderator should be seen as active, and not just this special status that's conferred on you for life regardless of whether you ever come back to the site or not. I think it's part of an outlook where we do periodically, as a community, take clear looks at our moderation stance and evolve it as necessary. Site culture shifts, and we need all of our moderators along on the ride.
And in particular, I think OP is right to want a clear participation and used-in-practice line of communication with every moderator. We have a substantial amount of turnover, and a bit of digging is likely to turn up a substantial fraction of our active user base who joined after Manish effectively stopped moderating.
It's also worth noting that the stepping-down of a moderator who had become inactive has explicit precedent - mbq was elected as a moderator in 2011, together with David Z and dmckee, and s/he stepped down in mid-2014, about some six months after the last of their publicly-recorded moderation activity. Not to mention stronger precedent on other SE sites.
More importantly, though, to address the key voice that we should be hearing from here: Manish, what's up? What is your take on this? I can very well understand the pressures pointing away from physics and away from internet participation that come from a move to software development. Obviously the 2013-era Business As Usual has been replaced - but by what?
Just a quick note about the moderator perspective on this: as far as the duties of moderation are concerned, it doesn't really matter to us. After all, if someone is not regularly acting as a moderator, whether they have a diamond or not doesn't make any difference in our ability to carry out those duties. And if something is causing a problem, we have ways to deal with that; for instance, if we feel there are not enough active moderators to handle the workload, we can coordinate with the SE team to schedule an election.
Is there any mechanism to enforce the decision if he does not manifest any will to follow the community's wish?
Separately from what I said above, individual people in the community (including mods) can have their own opinions about whether it makes sense for a moderator to retain their diamond even if their activity is low. However, as far as I know, there isn't a process to turn those opinions into action, at least not a direct one. Moderators' accountability to the community is less than e.g. a democratic system where elected officials can be impeached, and that's by design, since moderators need the freedom to make unpopular decisions sometimes without worrying about their position being at risk. (At least, that's what I read somewhere. Of course if the mods are constantly at odds with the community, that's a whole different kind of problem.)
If there are serious concerns that would warrant a moderator's removal from the role, there's a process in place by which the SE team, if prompted by "numerous, substantiated complaints from users on the site", can do it, but I don't think the team would consider low activity enough to start that process. (I'm not saying that is or isn't how it should be, I'm just saying that is the current state of things.)
Said moderator logs in from time to time, so we cannot say for sure whether he's actually doing any actual moderation or not. The two options are
He does not moderate at all, or
He does perform some actions occasionally, but leaves no trace.
In either case, I'm not too happy about the situation. If this person is not doing any moderation, then the logical course of action is to step aside.
On the other hand, if he really is doing some moderation in the background, I would feel uneasy about the fact that a person I never interacted with is doing such important work. I want to hold moderators accountable for their actions. Manish was elected, spent some time moderating, and eventually became inactive, long before I joined SE. I have no idea how he behaves, and I don't want him to have the power that comes with the responsibility of being a moderator.
In conclusion, both options lead me to suggest that maybe he should resign. I am obviously very thankful for his time making this community what it is today, but I see no point in him staying a moderator when he has de facto resigned a long time ago.
There are many actions that the moderators take that aren't visible to users (e.g., cleaning up comments), so the bulk populous of this site would not able to determine how much said moderator is actually doing.
I think that so long as the moderator is not actively harming the site (no such evidence) and the current (visibly?) active moderators are not complaining (doesn't seem to be the case, given DavidZ's response), there really isn't cause for anyone to try removing the moderator.
An apparent "invisibility" isn't enough to justify trying to remove a moderator, in my opinion. I think actionable evidence is what is needed to move forward, but pretty much all of us are not privy to such evidence, hence any calls need to come from higher up (i.e., other mods or SE team).
