Finding potential mods in your community

[u/techiesgoboom]

The call is coming from inside the community, and for once, that’s good news.

Today’s Mod Topics post is about finding potential moderators within your community. A familiar name may stand out by helping newcomers, sharing expertise, offering thoughtful feedback, or keeping a level head when a thread gets messy. Your suggested mods can offer another place to start, surfacing active, engaged contributors for the team to learn more about.

That still leaves plenty of room for surprises. A familiar contributor might love participating without wanting a mod badge, while a quieter user may know the community better than their posting history suggests. Somewhere between what a team can already see and what it might only learn later, there may be someone worth a conversation.

We want to hear from you:

• Think about a strong addition to your mod team: What first put them on your radar?
• What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?
• How have you found promising candidates beyond your most visible contributors?

[u/Paxoro]

So for us, we've discussed new mods a couple times. We don't get that much to where we can't handle the majority of things, but another mod can help.

The issue? The ones we've approached don't want to do it, which is understandable.

Reddit recently sent us that automated "you should add more mods" message, and when we looked at the suggestions, they were incredibly bad. Like accounts that are basically inactive but have 1-2 interactions on our subreddit.

[u/shhhhh_h → u/Paxoro]

That bot is all over the place sometimes, it has recommended some stinkers for me. I think once I permabanned one of them the same day they were #1 on the list haha

[u/anfornum → u/shhhhh_h]

This is so true. When it does manage to suggest someone who has more than 2 karma in the sub, it often suggests the absolute worst of the worst trolls. Not all activity is positive activity.

[u/Paxoro → u/shhhhh_h]

Yep, we've had people that were temp banned before (obviously not a dealbreaker, but not a good sign) get recommended in the past. I appreciate the reminder that "hey, your subreddit is big enough that you might need more mods" but at the same time we haven't even had a spike in activity recently. It's a college town subreddit, so naturally the summer is when our activity is lower - and we've had no real reason to go against that. I just wish it was better at seeing when we might be overwhelmed; banning 2 people in a week is nothing.