Nah, they're not all dropping like flies. Though that's only because there's something like a dozen and change though. At least, of active ones. There aren't enough to even have drop like flies.
But on a more serious note, this isn't ever going to happen. There have never been "enough" mods, even back in 2007 when the team was at about 135 total mods counting my round that had just gotten there. That was around the time where Gaia was getting towards its peak user count, etc. It was also around the time when Gaia was trying to do it all and was spending more than it could afford to. The Customer Service team is always one of the first branches in Gaia to take a hit if at all possible financially. In 2008 a number of my mentors, the remote admins, as well as even some in-house staff were let go. It happened in 2010, once again. Since then, to my knowledge, there hasn't really been much of a beefing up in the CCS team, just trimming down around the rest of the company (To be fair, other areas were hit in those years too, just that the second one pretty much put the CCS team to near bare bones already).
I say all that to say that the Customer Service side of Gaia isn't a huge priority/focus, even from the view of a normal user. Both of the aforementioned staff cuts were big deals in GCD at the time for understandably obvious reasons.
This is important because it takes a certain number of admin staff to be able to handle new rounds of moderators. Even though current moderators do the vast majority of the legwork in terms of training new mods, you still need office staff to organize it. Kind of look at it like the office staff being the managers, and the mods doing training being assistant managers. The office staff still need to devote a lot of time to the process even if they aren't personally training every single new moderator that comes in. So, just starting at the top level you have the whole financially feasible crap going on, and not enough people to make that part work. But what the hell, maybe the mods can team up and try to do something that would make their life easier, right?
Not quite. I'm gonna be frank, and not in the nicest way, which is a large part of why I'm not green anymore. There exist on the team, and always have, an unfortunate number of mods that aren't properly trained and/or that are not competent enough to be there in the first place. Part of this is due to the above mentioned lack of office staff, since reviewing a mod to see if they just made a few mistakes or they are just too dumb to stay on the team takes time. The point though is that of the bare handful of mods on the team now, there is already a chunk not fit to be wandering around off of apron strings, which means they certainly can't handle training new mods. Of the ones that can train new mods (which requires more than just being a decent/good mod), most are Global/Omni, the ones which are most stressed and backed up due to having special queue loads that include a variety of things. Assuming that they were "allowed" to stop meeting quota to keep up with the training because of how time intensive it is, there aren't very many of them. Throw in those who would actually want to train as opposed to just existing and battling queues, and you have a very, VERY limited potential trainer pool.
The team has deteriorated for years. There was always a revolving door, but as Gaia's direction changed, both at the user view level and behind the closed doors regarding moderation policy and how things in general were handled there, the mod team lost more than it gained. Hell, I lost interest as a user a good year or two before I got the boot; I had only stayed because I enjoyed the work and the team. The "compensation" they get is, for all intents and purposes, nothing. So, you're only going to really have mods who are staying there for nostalgia, because they can't let go, because "If I don't do it, who will?", status, or whatever. You aren't going to get more mods partially because a good 90% or more of potentially qualified users aren't going to put up with the crap you do being a mod. I'm not talking about user side, because that's expected. Most people who can think in the way needed to be a mod also recognize what to expect from such a position, and simply won't apply because at this point, without tangible compensation, it probably isn't worth it.
I had hoped I would never have to really feel like saying this, but unless they consider actually paying mods real life currency through some system or other, we're probably not getting more. At least, not enough to make a difference, or not enough that are competent. The company is simply not invested enough in it to give CCS the resources needed up top, and the pool of proper candidates is too small. If you had those two, the current mod team would do their damndest to make it work even with their lack of people, because the expansion would be worth it. But that's not likely to happen.
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