Control. These people have almost no agency in their lives. They typically don’t work, or if they do, choose low responsibility roles with few demands on them. They also tend to live meagre lives, often living with parents and flat mates. They tend to be socially awkward, often self diagnosing autism and other afflictions. They revel in their victimhood, and choose to construct grand narratives about how their failures are the fault of society, and not them.

Consequently, they have very little control over their lives, and very low self esteem. They seek out control in the only place they will ever experience it: online communities.

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.

Just look at how the reddit protest ended. Once threatened with losing their status as mods, they all caved.

Money and power are powerful motivators, and the mods work for free.

I’m a glass-half-empty person. My views of a situation tend toward the negative so to me, the desire to be a mod stems from the enjoyment of saying “That’s not allowed!”

I know there are those who want to keep a community safe and assure the policies are enforced but if it means they get to swat someone’s nose and say “No, bad member”, all the better.

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

deleted by creator

I’ve modded and ran communities on and off since the 90s. I do it because I enjoy giving back in my own way and creating a place people enjoy to be. Really is altruistic, I started because a forum i was on the owner no longer had the time and the other option was for the site to go down, never really looked back. Being in the industry, running another server and checking in on posts in a topic I am interested in is usually a light extra load.

I operate in highly topical spaces so moderation is easier and setup correctly it just takes care of itself mostly. I do not envy the people who take on the task of trying to moderate general open post areas. OffTopic and Gen Discussion are always the biggest sources of forum drama.

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 personally moderated a few on Reddit just because I didn’t want them to fill up with porn when it’s a femboys hooters sub lol.

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.

“Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.” 🫡

Lack of social skills, mixed with little to no control of things in their personal life.

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.