Are moderators just purely altruistic? Or do they have an ulterior motive?
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
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.
I clean my home because we have guests over often and I don’t want them to hate me
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?
