Lotta commenters here clearly proclaiming they've never had the ~opportunity~ misfortune of moderating even a medium sized online community.
It is a very thankless job, but harder than moderating the forum was moderating the mods themselves. Power corrupts, but the tiniest bit of lame internet power corrupts absolutely, and the only people that ever apply to be moderators are those that seek this lame power.
It starts off with reasonable people but slowly becomes a cabal of knobs with unquestionable authority who hire more of the same people until you've got an insular group of narcissistic, condescending mods that are just there to defend their own power.
As a Serb living in the UK this hit me pretty hard.
Both operations were limited in scope for a prescribed number of moderations each time.
“Originally FYAD was a complete anarchy. Nobody moderated it, and it was good. When it started to become more popular, however, certain users did stuff that was just annoying (spamming huge images that broke the tables and made threads impossible to read, posting a billion threads, posting illegal porn, that sort of thing) so certain people called for some kind of moderation. Others said that a moderator would ruin FYAD. Fistgrrl, in her infinite wisdom, proposed the Idiot King contest.
Once a week, she (or another admin) posts a thread. The admin has already two numbers, one for the Idiot King and one for the Loser King. Everyone who wants to enter the contest posts under that thread, and chooses a number between 1 and 100. When the contest is over (Usually 20 minutes or so), the person who posted closest to the Idiot King number becomes the Idiot King for a week, with most of the powers of a moderator and a ceremonial title. The person who posted the number closest to the Loser King number is banned for a week. Anyone who posts a duplicate number, a number that is not between 1 and 100, or posts in the IK thread but has not posted in FYAD in the last 24 hours is also banned for a week.
UPDATE: April 30, 2003: Lowtax did the IK contest this week, and instead of numbers he asked people to post states. What a crazy guy!”
I never read actual confirmation for this but I assume the position was named for the Soul Coughing song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qAxjmvvtOk
One thing, and alluding to the other reply, is the "benevolent dictator", they need to be keeping the mods in shape - not doing any moderating themselves, but to keep them from running amok. This is how I ran thing until I didn't have time any more, at which point things deteriorated (not in some dramatic way, mind you.)
The other thing is that mod selection is really, really difficult. Maybe 100% of people that "apply" or show any desire to be a mod are mostly just thirsty for some of that banhammer power. Additionally, on a gaming forum, the general age and maturity of these applicants leaves much to be desired. Generally I handled this by throwing mod responsibilities as a burden of those that were generally already community contributors in other ways (devs, etc) and they seemed mature enough. I think this made a difference compared to other communities that I saw around that time.
In retrospect one other thing that should have been done would be to separate the mod identity from the community identity as a way of tempering the ego that sometimes causes issues. Lots of forums and whatnot slap a load of badges and medals on mods that gives the role an air of privilege that isn't deserved.
...and none of this really applies to the context of reddit, and especially not for the larger communities of millions of users. The structure just doesn't scale since your dictator just can't see what all the mods are doing.
It is very thankless, but i do think it's neat what tools reddit tried to give us.
Just my .02
This model is dangerous when no worthwhile applicants arrive after the call for new mods. Then the forum either stagnates, is overrun with spam, or the head admin starts becoming active (therefore putting them on the path to petty power trips that they just cleared the leadership board to be rid of).
I do believe that a country run by a benevolent king or dictator is probably the most effectively run.
That role is just mired for 10 bad ones for every good one.
It is like the duck on the pond. Looks calm on top but the legs are frantically keeping them in place.
It was mostly OK, the biggest eye opener at the time (I was 20ish) was when I'd hop onto one of the other admins (female) irc account and holy hell that was an experience in private conversations.
I was also quite active trying to detect and stop certain scammers, but it’s more or less impossible now.