Moderators protect us from the worst of the internet. That comes at huge personal cost.

Dot.@feddit.org to Technology@lemmy.world – 162 points –
Moderators protect us from the worst of the internet. That comes at huge personal cost
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I can imagine having to go through hours to days worth of post related to hatespeech alone. How many months has Lemmy been around now?

Having done it for a living for a few months, you cannot possibly imagine how bad it gets.

No, seriously. I already had very little faith in humanity going in, and thought I'd seen the worst the internet had to offer. Scraping the actual bottom of the barrel is difficult to even describe. I had to force a stunned sense of humor about it to detach myself a bit as a coping mechanism.

It sounds like it might be a good job for sociopaths. Since nearly everything I've read from those who have actually done that moderation is about the effect on them due to their empathy, a lack of natural empathy seems like it would be advantageous.

I wonder if there's been a study on that.

Those folks are too busy being CEOs of the worlds largest companies abusing their workers.

You need empathy to moderate. What other reason is there to do it? You want to make the community a better place by keeping things civil and on-topic. You also need to be able to level with people about their criticisms and concerns.

I think it's actually been around for three or four years, but I didn't start using it until the Reddit API stuff last June (2023).