This is absolute bullshit.
I used to be a mod on /r/soccer, and there were strict rules around duplicates, and on keeping things related to football news and OC. It’s the most popular sport in the world, and when you’ve got enough subscribers to fill multiple stadiums, just “posting anything football” doesn’t scale. You also end up with a huge amount of content about the most popular teams, and when there’s a long-tail of fans from other leagues/countries you isolate a lot of people.
I can happily say that in the time I was a mod there were no questionable decisions. The mods went out of their way to verify decisions, discuss them with others, and reverse any bans if the user acknowledged that they’d broken rules. What the mods got in return was:
- Probably 5-10 death threats a day. No hyperbole.
- A handful of script kiddies that tried to spam the sub with offensive content, CP, and stuff that obviously breaks the rules.
- One stalking attempt on a mod that resulted in the police getting involved, a potential arrest, and a kid getting kicked out of school.
- Several people getting pissy, starting their own subs, and then realising that keeping things on topic and stopping people posting “Paul Pogba skills compilation 2015-2020 Despacito Remix” several times a day is quite tricky…
Funny enough, pretty much every decision was made by reports. Four reports triggered a message in modmail, and we just followed what users had reported…
How does moderating like that work? Do you guys take shifts? Is there a group chat?
Everything is done via modmail. Users report posts/comments, and the reports go into a queue that basically says “this comment has been reported due to X”. As a mod, you go into the queue, review the content, and decide what to do. Very occasionally, you’d look at the new posts, but very few people did this, because reports would usually come into modmail within minutes. In terms of “power”, all that was different from being a normal user was some extra buttons, and modmail.
Often we’d be called out for banning people, or deleting things. This was almost always the admins, because I assume people had broken rules that had incurred their wrath, or they had been caught with duplicate/spam profiles to get around bans. We got a lot of shit for one ban…which was the kid that got in trouble with the police for stalking a mod at their place of work.
There were about 15 of us, and we were told to basically do as much or as little as possible. All the rules were community driven, so users got a say in what rules to add (don’t accept this source, no compilations, no news from years ago to confuse people, etc).
Sadly, with such a popular sub, a post that clearly breaks rules might get 300-500 upvotes before it’s removed, and you get the typical “but everyone likes this post, why remove it?!”. In my experience, users don’t care if it breaks the rules, until they care it breaks the rules. There is no winning when you’re a mod.
I did it because I used the sub for a decade, and wanted to give back while.i had been laid-off from work (COVID times). I definitely don’t regret it, and if Reddit weren’t so shit I’d do it again.
Yeah your experience matches mine. Id really encourage people to not blanket trash on all mods. It is a lot of work that goes into moderating communities and it is either done by people who love the community, or by someone who loves that power dynamic. I’m not saying all mods are perfect, but give a chance for individual mods to prove themselves. It’s generally a thankless job, especially lately. By trashing on all mods we’re just going to scare away the good intentioned people and all that is left are the power hungry ones.
