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.
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.
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.
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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
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?
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.
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.
Some people perhaps find they enjoy being able to control large communities - there are definitely some “power mod” users forming here on Lemmy and I don’t know that it is clear why or what that will look like going forward.
I don’t think being a mod is always about having bad motives. I look after a community for a table top role playing game across Discord, Reddit, and here - the community isn’t huge but isn’t insignificant (expect here where there is no activity at all, the main hub is Discord). I recruited a team of mods to help with that, particularly Discord. Not to speak for them, but it’s people who enjoy being around the community and being a part of it. Nothing selfish or power-hungry about it - it is simply for the love of supporting a community you come to love and helping to make sure it continues to be a space the people using it want to be a part of. I set up the community because I enjoy the game, there wasn’t one already, and I didn’t want to clutter up other spaces talking about it. People joined and more importantly stayed because they enjoy the people and the space.
I think a test is when there are issues, or when you decide it is time to move on - are you happy to pass the community on to others who would like to look after it, or do you not do that and lock it down or get rid of it entirely. That feels incredibly selfish, and speaks to your reasons I think; whereas if you are happy to pass the torch because you care about the community which has formed in the space more than whatever you get out of doing the job, it is probably more likely you are doing the job altruistically and because you care.
I’m sure the above isn’t always the case and there are so many reasons and scenarios, just my thoughts at the moment :)
On Reddit, I think a lot of them monetize it. But generally speaking it’s a rewarding thing to feel like you’re building something greater than yourself.
Pretend that you moderate a food subreddit. And people in that sub talk a lot about fries. Specially classical potato fries and the “new” yucca fries. Often with heavy debates, but often just mentions.
Then you have ACME Yucca Inc., a brand of yucca fries, contacts you. And they offer you the following deal: “promote our yucca fries in your sub and we’ll give you money.” You accept it, and bend the rules of your community to selectively promote yucca fries and ACME over Wonka Potato Co. and potato fries. Stuff like this:
Alice says “eeew, potato fries are disgusting shit, go drink some bleach!”. You let Alice do it. And if someone calls you out, you say “Alice is just expressing her opinion!”.
Bob says “eeew, yucca fries are awful, you have poor taste.” You ban Bob for rudeness. "We snoos shall not stand against this sort of hateful comment!"
Someone posts a bag of ACME yucca fries. You do nothing.
Someone posts a bag of Wonka potato fries. You remove the post as spam then report the poster upstream to the admins, so the poster gets shadowbanned.
Some user posts a rather bad recipe for homemade yucca fries. You let him do it, but then you go on your alt account and say "why bother? Just buy some from ACME"
Some user posts a rather good recipe for homemade potato fries. You remove the post because the submitter missed a comma, or another shitty reason.
It is totally fucked up. And the worst part is that it’s damn hard to detect: the individual actions usually sound reasonable, you’ll only notice that something is off either when it’s too late (the sub circlejerks around yucca fries) or if you somehow know which mod did what, and follow his mod actions across a certain period of time.
On further hindsight, I should’ve picked another example. Because now I’m craving some yucca fries, too. With bacon, grana/parmesan, chives. And a beer. (They’re a common bar snack where I live.)
At this point, there are several people with 12+ year old reddit accounts that they never plan to use again, myself included. Morals are for things you care about...
Each person has one’s own reasons, I guess. And they might change and evolve over time. That’s what happened with me.
Moderating a forum years and years ago, it was about contributing and “making my part”, as if I had a moral duty to pay back to the community that I enjoyed. Then in Reddit it was about helping a small community to stay alive, when most mods were MIA and the only one who wasn’t was [likely] overburdened; I feared that the community would end “banned as unmoderated” and/or taken over by a specific powermod. Then now in Lemmy it’s about creating spaces to discuss things that I enjoy.
In none of those cases I’d say that I was/am being altruistic - I’m motivated by my own wants. But if other people benefit from it, so be it.
For some perhaps there’s also the feeling of power (all hail the almighty janny). Others might get off-record monetary incentives to do it. Others might be genuinely altruistic, unlike me. Who knows.
I was a mod because I reworked the CSS there and then just stuck around moderating the community a bit as most of the people who volunteered as most kinda lost interest after a few months and even weeks. I personally never wanted to be a mod just to be a mod.
Some do it to help the community, some want to shape the community, some do it because they like the tiny feeling of power and some all or some of these.
I've been a mod on a game subReddit. Mostly because there was only one active mod before and they couldn't handle it all. Game wasn't particularly universally loved so general internet hate and Reddit hivemind hate often spilled over into it. Why I did it? Because I enjoyed talking about that game in a positive environment.
In all honesty: the negative vibes on Reddit towards moderators took a lot of the joy out of it. Imagine temp banning someone because they keep calling racist slurs towards other users, then perma banning them because they continue, and then they start making new accounts over and over to send hateful messages towards you. Then you browse some Reddit for your own leisure only to read the general consensus that all mods are powerhungry faggots.
End result was worth it though, I guess? Sub is in a good place now. Positive vibes, and little bullshit. No longer an active mod though, because without RIF I don't have to proper tools to keep moderating from phone. Can't even enjoy it the way I used though. Bitter? Slightly. But I have good hopes about my new online social environment here.
I've met power hungry asshole mods. I'm sure I've met plenty of great ones, but you don't realize they're mods because they don't behave like idiots and are just normal users that are nice enough to interact with. I guess the people who generalized mods are mainly the ones that get banned rightfully.
When people complain about certain roles like moderators and project managers they always focus on thee terrible ones because that is what humans tend to focus on. Those roles wouldn't exist if they weren't necessary to handle large numbers of people interacting, and 99% of the time the people in the roles are fine and everything goes smoothly and nobody really notices.
Unfortunately those roles are attractive to power hungry people and those few are who everyone remembers.
Unfortunately those roles are attractive to power hungry people and those few are who everyone remembers.
That's the sad part. I've met more incompetent or power hungry people in management positions than really good ones. They exist, but I've made my peace with those who at least don't keep me from working.
and everything goes smoothly and nobody really notices
Exactly this. In the sub I frequented the most, we had a huge problem with T-shirt scammers and Karma Farming repost bots, but the mods usually nuked those pretty fast. However, since we’re all busy adults with limited spare time, the mods can not be online and vigilant 24/7 and occasionally a bot or scammer slipped through the cracks.
I wasn’t a mod (didn’t want to, TBH) but always openly called these out in addition to reporting them, just to make sure noone clicked on the scam links until an actual mod was able to remove the post. In these situations it happened quite often that people started to argue with me, demanded to know why I thought that “totally harmless guy showing off a cool shirt” was a scammer and the like, simply because THEY had never ever seen a scam attempt in the sub before - as those posts were usually removed pretty quickly …
This is also my case. Was never a moderator of anything, but felt responsible for providing a place where the community I participated on in Reddit could continue here, so I took on the challenge.
Exactly, there doesn’t have to be any deeper meaning behind it. The community does not exist yet, so you make one. I don’t see a difference between a moderator and any other user of a community as long as it is small. Perhaps you have to delete a bot post occasionally, or check if there are any technical difficulties. When a community has a lot of people in it, it’s probably a lot more work because you have to look out for trolls and evil people. :O
Sometimes, it's about the perception of power, but these people tend to make the worst sorts of moderators. Sometimes, it's about wanting to steer a community in a certain direction or to stabilise a community in the direction it's already going in. As for me, I've gone through the first two, plus had a third path - I was effectively deputised as a moderator twice as a spam-catcher.
Regardless of the other stuff, deputy spam catcher is and extremely valuable contribution to the community. I have requested this of people on Lemmy and been pleasantly surprised by how willing people are to help.
I recently offered to mod and the 3 other mods seem to have the same feeling... it needed to be done and we want the community to thrive... I'll let ya know when the power gets to my head though
Personally, I would want to be a mod because ooh status and also because I want to make myself useful, do stuff, etc. Basically if I have so much time in my hands that I could help out in an online community.
Idk though, those were my thoughts when I was 13 and now I’m just too lazy to want to be a moderator, and too easily triggered.
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