It feels like a lack of perspective, brought on by spending a lot of time online. Unlike real life, disconnecting from online drama is always a button press away.For starters, this is not true. Stuff that happens online has real world consequences. People get hired, fired, meet people they marry, get doxed and have their personal contact info put out there and on and on. The Internet is not disconnected from real life to the degree that your comment makes it sound.
I was a military wife for two decades. I lived in the High Desert where I dealt routinely with coyotes and large spiders and poisonous snakes, etc. I have spent time on health forums where deaths were so routinely reported that they had their own practices for how to deal with death, their own culture surrounding that so to speak. These experiences have left me somewhat thick skinned.
I read accident claims for over five years at an insurance company. Because of the aforementioned background, it was rare for me to be disturbed by the detailed medical and police reports that I read for up to 8 hours a day, five days a week. Many of my coworkers found the work far more stressful than I did.
But I would absolutely not want to have to moderate the photo and video stuff described in this article. And I would absolutely feel personally threatened by people making ugly threats of the sort that you dismiss with "That's cool, kid. Bye now. *Ban".
I'm pretty thick skinned, but I'm also a woman. Most of the people who are moderators are women. A lot of this nastiness is absolutely aimed at women. I think it hits a lot closer to home for most women than it does for most men. Women tend to routinely deal with genuine threats to their welfare, such as stalking, harassment and rape, that men tend to be largely exempt from.
When you recognize that your work impacts real people and how safe they are, that also can be a burden. When I read accident claims, in most cases, no lives hung in the balance. That is part of the reason it did not bother me to read them: I was not deciding whether or not to report anything to the police or otherwise take an action that impacted someone's personal safety. I was only deciding whether or not to cut someone a check and whether or not to refer the claim to the fraud department.
In a few cases, I was trying to get it paid rapidly because the customer was broke and facing having their power cut off and nothing to eat in the house. But, really, what I did mostly did not have a sense of "And if I do the wrong thing, someone could wind up killed, raped, fired from their job etc." What moderators do can have such impacts. That kind of responsibility can wear on a person. Perhaps not you, but plenty of people would find it wearing.
The Internet is something of a Pandora's box, it seems.