Are moderators just purely altruistic? Or do they have an ulterior motive?
As a moderator, i find it satisfying to clean my little corner of the internet.
We all see spam an scams when we use social media, and there’s not much that you can do about it, maybe report it to admins if you have a minute. For the most part, you’re powerless.
But on my fenced area of the internet, i actually get to do something about it. If your bot reposts content on r/shittyfoodporn to farm karma, i will pluck it out like a snail from my salad and kill it. Removing bad content is as satisfying as popping a pimple, it gives me the same joy as a retired dad meticulously cleaning his garden.
The less enjoyable part is when i have to interfere with the users themselves. Mildly saucy fanart will get posted to r/zootopia and i have to decide if it’s over or under the line, and it feels bad to remove a post that somebody legitimately just wanted to share.
Most unpaid moderators across the entire Internet do so because they have a higher than average interest in the community and want to help keep it running well. You will find some who want to spin a narrative, and some who just want to see a number go up, and some that want to troll their community, and even a small amount who actually are paid shills - but all of these groups put together is but a tiny fraction of all moderators. They’re just usually the most noticeable and so color your perception the most. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, shitty mod gets the public’s attention.
There’s a middle ground between being altruistic and having an ulterior motive:
You want the community you’re willing to moderate to not be filled with crap because you personally like it better when it’s not filled with crap.
Kind of similar to how most people clean their home primarily because they don’t like living in filth rather than to benefit society.
And some people have Opinions™ about where forks and spoons go in the cutlery drawer and where to put sporks and get annoyed at their flatmates when they blindly grab from where they expect the forks to be and end up with a spoon in their hand instead.
I have an opinion on this - the order in the drawer is: knives, forks, spoons.
(I will take my spork-organising advice from t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m!!!)
TTRPG enthusiast u/trouser_mouse, omg. (sometimes I get mistaken for you) Is it true that you once painstakingly arranged hundreds of aluminum sporks inside your trousers and set half a dozen mice loose as an experiment to create a makeshift automatic xylophone?
Yes, it is! I can’t believe you know that!
It was a very complex process, fraught with danger because of both the sporks and the half dozen mice. To be honest, I didn’t really think it through - but then isn’t that how all the best inventions involving mice and/or sporks happen.
The mice despite my best efforts have actually been breeding, so the descendants of the original mice are currently preparing to play Barbie Girl by Aqua for the premier of Barbie on July 21, 2023.
This is what it might be like https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fc6AujDe28o (fyi this is not footage from in my pants).
Have you bought tickets for yourself and all of your mice yet?
Yes we all have tickets! One of the mice said they hope to be on the soundtrack for the squeakel
Also, big spoons, then little spoons. Not together in the same slot, you monsters!
… so you’re telling me I need five slots for spoons?
spoiler
Salt/caviar spoon, coffee spoon, tea spoon, dessert spoon, tablespoon
I’m a monster who separates only the tablespoon into a separate compartment.
Hold on I need to check with the wife if neat spoons are something we’re allowed to invite people into the relationship over but I’m sure it’s okay
Wait, you have a coffee spoon and a tea spoon? Fair enough, you’re not a monster, you’re just weirdly anal about spoons. I’m not criticizing. I’m being weirdly anal about silverware placement.
There are two more spoons I lack in this collection. But no, I just like this series as it’s semi-retro, and I thrift it at second hand stores and at auction sites.
I was joking otherwise, just wanted to throw my punch in this discussion. :D
Jesus Christ
How do you feel about forks in the same slot?
spoiler
Pickled herring fork, sandwich/dessert fork, table fork, pickle/crustacean fork
Although, I have to admit I keep these in three separate slots.
Omg, I just found out there are two more forks I don’t have! Going to waste a month tracking them down… (Ignore me, this reignited my sometimes-pastime of completing my cutlery, just wanted to share some of my joy.)
These are great, the long ass skinny one is my favorite lol. But why is there a fork specifically for pickled herring? And who uses a fork for a sandwich??
The long ass skinny one is great for pickle jars on the dining table. We love pickles.
The herring one, well, it’s called “sillgaffel” in Swedish. We do use it when we eat pickled herring, but also for olives and other small delicacies served in small bowls instead of using tooth picks to pick them out.
The “sandwich” one is accompanied by a “sandwich” knife, and are intended to be used for appetizers, and according to an older friend, single sandwiches with ham and (sometimes melted) cheese would be served as appetizers occasionally.
There are dessert forks as well, but they are rare. There are proper crustacean forks too that I would like, as they’d be useful.
There also are supposed to exist fish forks (and fish knives) in the series as well, but I kind of stop before that.
Thank you for subscribing to obscure Swedish cutlery facts. Reply with NOOOOO STOOOOOP! to unsubscribe.
I can’t live in this kind of chaos! It’s like the last days of Rome
I hope you have named these forks after Muppets.
From left to right, they are clear to me as: Robin the Frog, Kermit, Bunsen Honeydew, and Beaker.
I would probably have some kind of breakdown if I opened the drawer to find total anarchy like that.
I clean my home because we have guests over often and I don’t want them to hate me
Well said. I think this idea we all have that altruism and self interest are mutually exclusive, is wrong.
In reality, when we’re in a community, what benefits the community and what benefits us, are often the same thing.
Beautifully said.
(Unless it is well-crafted and beautiful crap)
Yep, I’m usually not a moderator, but occasionally if they are being asked for and the community I’m part of is turning to shit, I’ll step up.
Sometimes it’s reluctance tinged duty. Like "I really like this community, it’s well moderated and the current mod team are pretty balanced in their decisions. Except they’ve said they’re struggling with the load. Oh no, if it becomes too arduous, we’ll start losing mods and then we’re at risk of losing the culture we’ve built up here if newer mods have different priorities.
Sometimes chipping in as a mod is the lazy option when the alternative is a worse browsing experience (or finding a new place when a community goes to hell)
Like you say, it’s a misplaced between altruism and my own motives
This especially holds true for niche subjects. I love back country skiing so I created and moderate /c/Backcountry . The mirror community on Reddit is extremely small and dumb crypto spam sits around for days before removal because there is only one mod. He seems like a cool person dedicated to the sport, but he just can’t be there all the time. I created the community in the hopes that I can invite and keep a larger mod team.
This is exactly it.
I volunteered for several subs because I didn’t like all the junk I was seeing and wanted to clean it up.
And now I’m starting some communities here on Lemmy because I’d like to enjoy similar content without going to that other platform.
I’m seeing spam start to show up here and looking for ways to help stop that.
I haven’t been a mod, but I volunteered for Transcribers of Reddit. For me, it was about having something to do that’s not entirely a waste of time. So I’d call that egoistic altruism.
Power fantasies, of course.
That’s a good question. I think, kinda like politics in real life, the people that would make the best moderators are the ones that have very little desire to do it while often times the ones that do want it are the worst suited.
Someone once made me a moderator of a ~30,000 subscriber subreddit without me asking and I hated every second of it. All I ever tried to do make the place as good as possible and enforce the rules in place. I got praised for being a good mod, but just as often I got called a power tripping asshole by people who didn’t want to follow the rules. You really can’t win, and honestly I wouldn’t want to even try to moderate again. It takes up too much of your time, you get almost nothing from it and even when all you are doing is trying to do your best, you still end up being hated by some people. It’s just not worth the hassle.
I think it’s similar to politics. Some people want to use privileges that the position provides for their own benefit, while others want to do good things and bring their ideas to life.
I think most mods start out as the latter, but a few will turn into the former. Nearly all mods are fine, just a few power-hungry ones ruin it for everyone. At least with lemmy it’s easy to spin up your own instance and start new communities.
“Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.” 🫡
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Hah, me too! I mean, in some cases that could explains it, too.
I do it in our (largish) discord server because, quite frankly, the trash won’t take itself out, and I like the community we have cultivated. Everyone wants a well moderated community, where people use the right channels for what theyre named, and don’t come into other channels and start spamming Nwords and other slurs. Everyone wants an unbiased moderation staff that follows a set of their own rules so people don’t get banned unfairly. And in my eyes that’s what we do. (I wont speak for other places on discord, just us) I like to be part of the group keeping chat clean for others to find people to play with. I enjoy talking to users and the conversations happening, so why not give a little time back to keep it that way?
I’m a light handed mod for a Facebook group of about 2,000 people. If I didn’t do that it’d either have to go private or it would be overrun with spam. I care about my community and giving everyone a fair go, so that’s why I do it.
I would imagine being a mod on a fediverse community would be much the same.
@CaspianXI I’ve always been of the opinion that if something you want doesn’t exist, go and do it yourself. That’s why I’ve modded and continued to do so-- things don’t just happen on their own.
I know there are some power trippers that just like to be the boss of things, but I’m assuming most are like me, who just want a happy and functional community to exist and thrive.
Beat me by fifteen minutes, lol. I was going to type something very similar.
Moderators should feel responsible for providing a safe space and enjoyable experience for the visitors and subscribers of their community. It’s ungrateful work, but someone has to do it. Power trippers who just want to be in charge of something are rarely good mods.
As long as some company doesn’t benefit financially, even a little bit, from me doing free work then I don’t really mind. I just wanted to see a community on a subject I am interested in grow. If it gets too big or too much work I will need to find new moderators and may step down altogether. It doesn’t seem like that will happen any time soon.
So basically I am already here browsing and it isn’t really that much of an inconvenience to click a few extra buttons on occasion to keep a community clean.
I was a mod on reddit for a few years. There was a very small sub for a cartoon/toy line I liked as a kid and the community was shuddered because there was no active mod. I didn’t think it would get much traffic and I was right. Once I got it back opened we’d have maybe 6-10 posts a years, mostly toy collections. It was super low effort to me, I had one t-shirt spam I had to remove and a few comments, so it was worth it to have it open again. It’ll close when I finally get around to deleting my account
