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.
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
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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.
“Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.” 🫡
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.
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.
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
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?
lmao clean it jannies.
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.
So you decided to come here and spit truth?
Power fantasies, of course.
Lack of social skills, mixed with little to no control of things in their personal life.
