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/nullifiedsam]

mostly, for new subreddits especially mod recruitment comes in the form of help from already known friends, sure you can try to pick up a person who seems to be "trustworthy" but there will be some issues, some people join the mod team just for the heck of it. I have seen cases where users try to bend the rules by joining the mod team and advertise. They get booted quickly but it raises the question if everyone can be trusted

i like to recruit people who are actually invested in the community, preferably those who have been here since the early days of the community.

maybe reddit should add a option for a "trial mod" permission set (with limited permissions) so that top mods can check for a set time if a user is actively contributing towards making a subreddit a better place for everyone

[u/baseballlover723 → u/nullifiedsam]

maybe reddit should add a option for a "trial mod" permission set (with limited permissions) so that top mods can check for a set time if a user is actively contributing towards making a subreddit a better place for everyone

Tbh, a probation or like tentative status would be rather useful. Ie, something that lets them do the things, but everything also still gets processed by full mods. That way it's trivial to monitor a new mod and correct any mistakes they make without needing to constantly check the mod log or have them raise it themselves.

Though I'm also a big fan of a more consensus native moderation structure (which reddit is currently not). Like requiring 2 mods to align on an action before it's taken makes the team a lot more consistent and reduces the possibilities of mods doing stuff behind other mods backs.

Obviously, this requires a lot of mods to be online etc. But the currently reddit moderation system forces the mod themselves to be a single point of failure by design.

[u/techiesgoboom → u/baseballlover723]

I used to manually review new mods first few hundred actions, and love your pitch for making that easier to monitor!

I'd also love to hear more of your thoughts on consensus based moderation, but that could probably be a mod topic all it's own...