User blog comment:Sannse/I Want to Be an Admin/@comment-5454372-20140514183631

One little phrase I'm finding quite applicable to this whole "can I be promoted?" situation:

"People don't respect you because you're an admin -- you were made an admin because people respected you."

(Yes, I ripped that from Naruto's Hokage/recognition conundrum >_>)

That's why asking to be promoted or trying too hard to earn the community's trust generally backfires and doesn't work. The people who are most trusted are the ones who don't need an incentive to contribute and help out: they're the ones you can trust not to have an ulterior motive because they were never aiming for adminship to begin with.

I do think that it's possible to have people who genuinely want to be admins for the right reasons, but I'm also inclined to think the aforementioned "no incentive helpers" have a better chance.