Are moderators just purely altruistic? Or do they have an ulterior motive?

  • snooggums@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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 …

    • VanillaGorilla@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.