I am founder and a mod of /r/schizoaffective been doing it for almost ten years now. I made the sub since I felt those with both mood disorder symptoms along side psychosis weren't served well by /r/schizophrenia, /r/depression and /r/bipolar and /bipolar2.

I am not a fan of Reddit in a lot of ways, but overall the other mods and I have made a pretty safe place for our community, and we have had relatively little trolling, hopefully it stays that way. Before Reddit I did in person meetups for a couple topics and even in highschool almost twenty years ago I was a big support for a lot of people. Reddit is just a pretty good platform compared to Facebook. The relative anonymity helps a lot in a mental health sub.

Have you ever started an irc channel? For me, it’s kind of like that. I mod some subreddits because I am interested in the topics and want to talk about it and help others talk about it.

I spend maybe five minutes a year on it, so it’s more of a responsibility than a labor.

As far back as I remember there’s always been bbs moderators. And almost always unpaid.

I think Reddit would be worse if mods were paid because then the positions would be more sought after and tried to run as a job.

I don’t think Twitter has equivalent moderation.

A slight tangent but...

Post some sort of "anti-musk" or "anti-apple" or whatever is popular at the moment and watch everyone rush in to come to that person/organizations defence.

I always find it astonishing when people do this and was always curious as to the motives as well.

I drive a Hyundai and have an iPhone, if someone were to say something critical of either I don't mind. I don't work for either company, i don't hold any of their stock, no family works there..

Yet there are always rabid fans and i suspect Reddit and such has its "fans" who feel compelled to moderate. Probably because they feel a sense of "community" or belonging to some company and are willing to do unpaid work, the same as people will post "pro apple" comments when someone makes a critical statement.

Look at the post the other day on the electric truck comments and others are writing that this is "a coordinated attack on Musk"??

People do odd things at times.

If there’s something I’m invested in, say programming, I wouldn’t mind spending time moderating a community about programming. Further, the moderation is a lot easier since basically all I have to do is determine whether something is programming or programming related. And people tend to usually follow moderation rules without claiming that moderation is an existential threat to their FREEDOM.

Twitter, OTOH, is a free for all cesspool. And that was with the moderation policies. Somehow it’s even worse now.

Some people like to have control over others, and get a kick out of enforcing rules they've made. These seem to make up the bulk of Reddit's moderators.

Others do it more casually, just because they wanted to have a forum for a topic and you need to do some light-touch moderating to keep the spam out.

Many people like to moderate online communities, it was the same in the age of phpBB forums. Can be explained with both charitable and non-charitable qualities.

When I was a free moderator for a thing it was during the time of my life I had little to no control over any aspect of what was happening.

I have to assume it's similar for others. Why do this work for free? My only answer to that is it gave me a feeling of being wanted or needed that I was severely lacking at the time.

I've seen people volunteer to pick up trash in their neighborhood public park. Do you think that's like a cult?

Or how about people who contribute to open source software that they use? Like a cult?

Volunteering to moderate a forum you participate in and enjoy is not really very different from those.

A multitude of reasons, I suspect. For instance, they want their community to be civil and not filled with spam. Also, if a subreddit is left unmoderated, it is likely to be shut down by Reddit staff.

It’s maybe a little unusual that they’re doing it effectively in service of a for-profit company, but otherwise it doesn’t seem strange. There’s a pretty long (>30 year) tradition of volunteer internet moderators; moderated usenet groups, irc, web forums (Reddit is really just a very big web forum, when it comes to it), now mastodon instances.

I have a subreddit dedicated to a specific programming topic, and I moderate it so that the intelligent, interesting, insightful, and empathetic members continue to participate and aren't driven away by trolls and low-effort content. There's nothing wrong with volunteering in order to make the world (from one's own perspective) a better place to inhabit.

The same reason people join HOA boards (hint: it has nothing to do with keeping property values up)

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