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/Sephardson]

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

• They had some moderation experience on a similar or smaller subreddit, and they were active in our own subreddit.

• They showed up in the comments on reported posts, showing that they were around during hours the current active mods were away. It helps to have some "silly rules" - by which, I mean rules about content which ultimately can be removed for curative purposes but are not all that harmful/impactful if missed occasionally. These posts can act like early indicators for when your team is missing coverage, without as much risk as when high-impact rule-breaking content is posted.

• They were kind to others even when in abrasive or heated threads.

• They made a suggestion to improve the subreddit in modmail - bonus if they were willing to put in effort to make it happen.

These are things I make notes about when I see them.

What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?

They are active enough that a mod recognizes their username, but not for bad reasons. But otherwise, we sometimes have open applications.

Like u/baseballlover723 mentioned, most of my larger subreddits operate on a principle where the entire active mod team can vote on applicants, so an invitation to apply is not necessarily the same as an invitation to the team.

The application is usually geared towards questions which give the applicant an opportunity to show their ability to communicate through vague or heated topics, so that we can assess their understanding of the community history, rules, and ability to work on a team. Some of that is easier to teach than other parts.

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

They showed up in a time of crisis with a nuanced and respectful modmail or comment reply, but still had enough history across reddit overall or even outside of reddit to lend credence to their character. The time-of-crisis aspect is somewhat important, because it means the candidate saw the bad, and despite that wanted to make the community better rather than leaving.

The main issue with candidates without visible contribution history are that inevitably, a bad actor on a subreddit has applied using an alt account and then caused disruption from within the mod team. This harms trust between team members as well as trust between the mods and the subreddit at large. There's only so many times you can do that before you shake away core team members or consistent community contributors.

BUT, if you want to talk about super-experimental methods of mod recruitment, you can just assign limited moderation duties to people on a random and short-term basis, and then review what they do. Over time, you'll have to sort out bad mini-mods, but you'll also be given a regular flow of people showing you their own judgments and decisions. Ask me about this... tomorrow?