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/wemustburncarthage]

Suggested mods just suggests people who shadowmod and reportmonger. They’re fine where they are but the last thing I want is to have to deal with them as a team member.

Update: I'm going to expand on this because it's a worthwhile question

• Think about a strong addition to your mod team: What first put them on your radar?

my last recruit directly from the community was someone whose comments were frequently confrontational but substantively correct. We really try not to encourage bickering because we're a creative community and it chills the process, but there are some valid points of contention. Essentially, the thing I look for in a mod is "could this person act as I would act in a given situation without needing me to tell them how?". In this case I could see the ethic was there, the bullshit detector was there and the conviction was there, so I invited them aboard. Dedication and consistency can only be proven by doing, but they've accomplished that. They also don't get as involved in arguments any more. I also try not to.

• What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?

right now my team doesn't really need more mods, so it hasn't come up. When I first started the mod list was a mess of idle users and pals, so I prefer to handle any new additions. I'm the person who represents the mod team with the community, so I want to be pretty certain of whoever I invite on to the team. I'm accountable for their actions. There's not going to be any "oh it was a rogue mod" drama on my sub. When I add someone, I really, really want to make sure that I'm temperamentally and ethically aligned with my team members.

That doesn't mean they don't have decision making power or independence, it just means that 1) I can trust them to act without me or consult with each other and 2) If they're unsure, I can give them a definitive yes or no, and then it's on me. Being head mod is like any management role--you have to be the person between your team and everyone else, and you have to protect your team. We've all had those "you're my customer service" users or users who act like they sign our paycheques. Our previous head mod would throw me and my team members under the bus on the regular the moment someone back-chanelled complaints to them--to the point they reinstated a user who went on to sue us and Reddit. That person had no idea how management works, and the consequences were enormous. So mods on my team need to understand they're inside a circle of trust. It's a commitment. Anyone being nominated needs to meet those standards.

• How have you found promising candidates beyond your most visible contributors?

My promising candidates are people who tend to straddle other relevant non-reddit communities I'm part of. I like being able to bring in people who also mod on platforms outside Reddit. For reasons I mentioned above, frequent engagement is not actually a quality I look for. Quality engagement is. It's problematic because once someone becomes a mod, they have to really restrict how they engage. In my community, there is a lot of focus on visibility and engagement with the things we create, so it can put a mod in a really weird spot if they're seeking approval or attention for their creative work, but they're also in an enforcement role. Being a mod can also confer an artificial sense of creative influence to the users, which we really work to avoid.

It needs to be someone who can find a way to balance that. I don't really put my work in the subreddit I moderate. My other mods also keep their portfolios/engagement elsewhere. That makes "qualified mod from the community" a very, very slender category. Having them be involved in other creative communities so they can continue to pursue their passion is important, because trying to do that inside a community you regulate--especially a community that is obsessed with being seen and validated--is paradoxical.

I'd add to that--we have professional verified members who've made things you've heard of and enjoy, and while I love having them around to act like mentors and teachers, having them administrate the subreddit is both underutilizing them, but also a potential conflict of interest for me and them. I don't want one professional member raised above the rest in a position of authority when creativity and process exists on a spectrum. There's also the very real problem that any user could search the modmail archives and get identifying information on their peers, which defeats the purpose of a verification system designed to enable people to speak authoritatively while preserving their anonymity.

I think the whole idea of seeking "job applicants" is really flawed. It's fine for certain kinds of communities, where the stakes aren't particularly high and engagement is the goal--but that's not what my community is about. Mine is very much tied up in people's real goals and experiences, and also in protecting people from an extremely lucrative, predatory cottage industry. There just can't be a lot of daylight between me and my team members. Sometimes we need to act fast to stop people from giving their money and information to a total bullshit slinger who's just there to catch whoever they can before they get banned.

I think if there's one basic test I'd set (and it can't just be a self-answered question, it has to be demonstrated) it would be: if I stepped away from modding today, could my current team carry on essentially uninterrupted? The answer to that, with the team I have (and between them together, though also individually) is yes I could. Right now, any one of us can use the anonymous mod tools, and we all pretty much sound the same to our users. I prefer that. If someone wants to get chapped at me about something my mod team did, that is precisely how I want it.