It’s hip to be racist against white people, did you forget? /s

But he is The Whitest…

sound of washing machine detergent race

Nothing. Don’t see how any other colour skinned person couldn’t have done the same thing.

On the teenage mod thing, I have a bit of insight-

So basically modding on Reddit sucks. You feel like you have zero support for a volunteer position and it genuinely becomes taxing. I moderated a large subreddit (4 mill+ subs) for a few years alongside 2 smaller (still 100k+) ones. Both of these were exhausting and I ended up letting auto mod do half the work.

I got invited by a friend to moderate a default subreddit. I lasted less than a week. The types of things people post on there that the users never see is horrifying and whenever I can afford therapy it will be getting brought up. I’m talking early 2000s gore sites level shit in addition to the buckets of CSAM.

I started moderating one of the smaller communities back in high school. Let me tell you, my time was worthless back then and I was on top of everything. Once college started, that slowed down a lot and setting up auto mod for the common stuff became entirely necessary. Once I graduated, I suddenly had zero want to moderate. I barely touched anything and automated 99% of my tasks.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that moderating defaults is damn near a full time job, and most of us adults just don’t want to do it. I know I sure as hell didn’t.

And let me tell you, some of the mods on there get just an awful break. Almost all of them are just people trying to build communities, many of whom have no idea how, especially once they get big. The real people to watch out for are the mods no one knows the name of. I know for a fact that many power mods were completely unknown. They used dozens of sock puppets to moderate hundreds of communities, all of them aggregated in private discords. I managed to find a wild invite to one once, but I got booted before I could start taking screenshots

Really not meaning to call out anybody, I haven’t encountered this much here on lemmy, but you often find those sort of attitudes with unpaid “jobs” online. Mods everywhere, wiki editors (incredibly territorial and clique-ish), etc.

There has to be the right mixture of passion, desire for control, and most importantly the free time to put into it. Also have to toss in the strong belief in your own idea of how the space you oversee should be. The free time part often leads to people without much better to do with their time/lives taking up the reins.

If the team is able to develop tools to reduce the time expenditure, or the userbase is small enough that things don’t tend to get overwhelming (almost all of lemmy), you don’t see it. But yeah, the big reddit subs, especially now with the third party API ban killing the overwhelming amount of available mod tools… it’s a real tempest in a teacup over there.

Again, most lemmy mods are great, with only a few notable exceptions. Thankfully it’s astoundingly easy to block users and communites on the fediverse, and usually you can find the same community topic on another instance and not miss out on much. Love this place.

Yep, and all gleaned from publicly available interviews.

Take it with a grain of salt, there are lots of pure falsehoods stated there. For example, Spez’s first stint in Reddit lasted two years longer than Swartz was involved (2007 for Swartz, 2009 for Spez).

A full time job they volunteer for because being a mod makes them feel special.

Yeah, I was the sole mod of a “mid sized” community of around 50,000 for several years. It took maybe 10 minutes or less of “work” in an entire week. For the vast majority of communities, even ones with a few hundred thousand subscribers, it simply does not take that much effort to filter out bad posts and handle reports and similar.

On the flip side, I have personally communicated with a decent deal of mods of major subs like news, politics, twoxchromosomes, etc. and in my experience it’s these subs that tend to get the… stranger dynamics, where a disproportionate amount of the mod team are people who have WFH jobs with essentially no actual workload, they’re stay at home disabled, they’re a NEET in some capacity (or maybe like, going to college but only taking a class or two a semester). Other subs like askscience revolve almost exclusively around discord channels with hundreds of “sub mods” who get together and kind of randomly review content and basically approve it on a lottery system.

So without being too sympathetic I almost get the CEO from a purely business standpoint. I genuinely cannot figure out a way that you would pay some mods at a rate “equal” to their workload, and how doing so would in any way make the site better and not completely fuck things up where people are now exploiting the payment system for profit without actually contributing to the site.

Perhaps they could get a share of the stonk that covers the other 179.7 million of his remuneration?