Ally, without them spaces like this here would be unusable and full of spam.
I think of them as people with a job to do. Some do it well, others do it less well. This is normal.
Yeah, it’s like asking “what does everyone think about bosses?” There are good ones and bad ones.
And then there’s the antiwork philosophy.
The “anti-work” philosophy isn’t against bosses or hierarchical structure. It’s about empowering the worker through systemic reforms like creating unions or workplace democracy - literally voting for your boss. Nobody is so naive that they want to get rid of administrative work. Workers want their just due and they can’t be faulted for that with our current systems and relationship to work.
Just like a Janitor, or a Security team. If they do their job well most people won’t notice. If they do a terrible job everyone suffers. Kudos to anyone who does a passible job out of the goodness of their heart.
And even one person doesn’t do it well or badly all the time.
In most of the places I exist, I think of them like janitors. Doing appreciated, but not-very-fun work, to keep communities moving.
Honestly, if I was in a place with moderators that felt like adversaries, I might not stick around very long.
And, like janitors, they usually go unrecognized for the help they give and heavily criticized for anything that’s not perfect.
I think they spend a lot of their time holding back a wall of crap from falling on all of us. Unmoderated forums are so bad.
Allies.
This isn’t the 90s anymore. Today, unmoderated/poorly moderated online spaces are breeding grounds for the usual toxic assholes who ruin everything.
They are an ally (that we sometimes dislike). The web would be too toxic for most without moderation.
Somebody has to do it. I’m just thankful that it is not me. I really don’t understand how you can’t appreciate the work of the mods.
I’m biased because I mod some large subs, but I’d say 95% of the time I see them as an ally.
Having seen behind the curtains, I’m glad they clean things up to keep the stage nice for me. You’d be shocked by the shit we see before it gets removed.
That said, that 5%-20% of mods that suck really suck.
Exactly. I’m a mod in a few subreddits, the biggest of which is /r/Showerthoughts. People don’t notice our existence unless we interact with them directly, and you rarely interact with users unless to ban them or to remove their content. So it is expected to be hated.
No way of generalizing. Actions speak in this matter.
If you’re clearly communicating about rules and applying reason in enforcing them, ally.
If you wield the BAN HAMMER with furious vengance and abuse your power, adversary.
They can be both. Unfortunately human beings tend to be very tribal and subjective. Therefore my opinion is that they can be some mixture of both depending on the subject matter and how impassioned the moderator chooses to be.
There’s no single uniform answer because they’re people and unique. I’ve dealt with some powertripping gross mods who only use their positions to further the benefits to them and their friends. I’ve also had selfless, kind mods who take hits in order to further their communities. Most are somewhere in between. When I’ve been a mod, I’ve not been a saint, but I’ve also not tried to actively create harm.
That’s a really broad question: Depends on the mod.
Some of them are decent human beings doing a shitty unpaid job because they care about the community, and some are power tripping assholes that shouldn’t be mods.
I think that many of them are so obsessed with civil language that they forget that advocacy for monstrous inhumanity can be done using only civil language, while civility in the face of monstrous inhumanity normalizes and encourages it.
I think that moderators who do this often find themselves to be the allies of monsters.
I think that the whole world doesn’t need to be divided up into little “with us or against us” wars like this; there’s nuance to be had, like in every other situation.
Some mods are good and only want what’s best for their community, and some mods are bad and are power hungry control freaks.
Mods are people, same as the rest of us. Often they’re valued members of the community before they’re given the position.
Do I think that the job needs to exist? Absolutely. Good, bad, or otherwise, they do a lot of work to protect us from the tidal wave of crap that comes in, whether it’s bots, scammers, trolls, hate advocats, etc., and I’m thankful that it’s not me who needs to deal with all of that.
TL;DR: Mods do important work, but they’re also people, and not everything has to be an “us VS. them” situation.
We need to differentiate between “online moderators” and “people with moderator permissions”. The first group of people is a valuable addition to every community, keeping it safe and secure. The second group uses their permissions to support their own opinion and should be banned on their own.
