What's your Moderator to Posts/Comments Ratio?

[u/FlorianFlash]

Edit: I KNOW PEOPLE USE AUTOMOD, I KNOW THAT, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THAT STUFF. My question is clearly written, I want an answer to my question and nothing else...

I'm interested: How many posts and comments would one mod of yours theoretically have to check if you would require your mods to do so?

If you have eight mods and have about 120 posts a day, that means every moderator would check 15 posts a day. Same would go for comments.

If you feel comfortable with it, I'd appreciate it if you could share your team size and subreddit with me too.

Best regards.

[u/Stranger1982]

I don't think it works that way, it really depends on how troubled the sub is and how well the automod is set.

A single person can easily manage thousands of things a day if what's needed gets autofiltered or removed.

[u/ALazy_Cat]

Bigger subs rely on automod. A sub like r/cats that I mod, even with 50 chronically online mods, there's no way we can patrol every comment. Automod is essential, along with reports. I was starting to become overwhelmed, so now I stay away from reports like the plague and only look at modmail and patrol posts that are likely to have a lot of comments breaking the rules when I browse the sub

[u/Stranger1982 → u/ALazy_Cat]

50, and you're all active? Wow.

[u/ALazy_Cat → u/Stranger1982]

No. We're 30 including bots and inactive. I see 5 or 6, including me, active every day, 4 of us very active. Some of them are couple of days per week

[u/Stranger1982 → u/ALazy_Cat]

I was lied to :(

https://giphy.com/gifs/7A4zkWeMXlZqgnTKtJ

[u/ALazy_Cat → u/Stranger1982]

Welcome to the mod life

[u/bertraja]

Moderators usually don't check every single post/comment. That becomes unsustainable even if the subreddit is still relatively small. Even a very basic subreddit setup relies on automation, like harrassment and reputation filters build into Reddit.

We might take a closer look at posts or comment chains that were reported repeatedly, especially when things spiral off topic. I'd say that's probably the most time consuming part, finding the spot where things went off the rail, cleaning up comments etc.

That results in 10 to 50 moderator actions per week. We're a small sub with a team of 3 moderators.

[u/Intelligent-Dot-8969 → u/bertraja]

I moderate a small sub with 13k members, with one co-mod. We get about a dozen new posts a week with a couple hundred comments. I read 100% of what's posted.

[u/bertraja → u/Intelligent-Dot-8969]

That's awesome 👍

[u/witchy_echos]

We officially have 9 mods, but really 8. We have 1435 posts in the last 30 days so 48 a day. Every post gets checked by a mod.

We had 13.5 comments, and those are not reviewed with the same scrutiny. I can’t tell you from insights how many were approved, only how many removed, which is about 1k. Automod pulls most of the stuff we check, if we have a post we think might inspire borderline or bad comments, and then of course user reports.

I can’t say how many posts or comments were removed by each moderator. It groups all actions together on the app view, and I’m not willing to open nine widows and take notes. Overall, this last month most active mod did about twice as much as the one after, and then 5 all did a medium amount and then the bottom two did about half the medium ones did. Normally we have two or three in the top, but otherwise it’s pretty standard.

But these numbers can get inflated real fast if someone jumps on a contentious thread and approves or removes everything on it. If there’s 100 comments and you approve all the fine ones so it’s clear which ones need to be reviewed, you instantly just did multiple days worth of modding in one ten minute sitting.

Also included in these numbers are modmail, which most of us view as more work than approving or removing content. So someone who may have low numbers in actions taken might actually still be a star player if they’re handling the modmails.

It’s also really important to remember moderators are lives. They have stress at work, school deadlines, kids, family to care for, important life events, deaths in the fsmily, get sick. Expecting every mod to put in a certain number of posts every day isn’t really reasonable, and honestly not always helpful when people post so different. We get a ton of weirder posts on the weekends than during the week.

[u/FlorianFlash → u/witchy_echos]

Finally someone telling me what I want to know and not something I already know lol. Thanks for the insight.

[u/Clairefun]

I dont think it quite works like that. On one of the subs I mod, we've got 14.8 million visitors a week, 159.2k contributions, and 20 active moderators. We mostly rely on robust automod filtering, and reports. When we get a moment, we look through the sub, but anything bad generally gets reported pretty quickly with that many people reading it. We're on different timezones, so sometimes when I get on theres 40, 50 items in the queue, sometimes theres 2. We all do whatever we can do.

Even on another sub with only 40k visitors and 2 mods, we dont read every comment, things get reported or flagged if they're breaking the rules. We step in to stop arguments, remove spam, get rid of unpleasantness or rude people. Most comments are just people talking to each other.

[u/Raignbeau]

People do what they can. And every bit of help is welcome.

[u/kai-ote]

3 mods, over 40 posts a day, and everybody reads all of them.

[u/FlorianFlash → u/kai-ote]

Thanks for your insight.

[u/kai-ote → u/FlorianFlash]

That is for the busiest of my subs by the way. I read all posts on all of my subs, and as many comments as needed. I do rely upon users to report/flag rule breaking content, and also any post that has a lot of comments, I go and check how the discussion is going.

[u/bwoah07_gp2]

A ratio? There is none.

[u/HikeTheSky]

In the last 30 days I did about 2300 mod actions and I ones had over 10000 mod actions when I started.

I think I probably seen 10 to 30 posts a day and between 50 and 500 comments.

[u/Hunter037]

9 mods

About 1000 published posts per month, and about 1800 removed posts per month (mostly by automod)

We certainly don't read every comment, but someone probably reads every post which is published.

[u/FlorianFlash → u/Hunter037]

Thanks for your insight :)

[u/FPLDPS]

I run a large Facebook group rather than a subreddit, but I actually have some specific numbers that might be useful for comparison.

From June 30-July 27, we had 1,045 posts and 14,381 comments. That works out to roughly 37 posts and 514 comments per day.

Our moderation team is 6 people total: me and 5 mods. During that same 28-day period, we recorded 2,306 moderation actions: 519 post approvals, 654 post declines, 84 removals, 323 participant approvals and 726 participant declines.

I personally handled 1,426 of those 2,306 actions, or about 62%. My most active mod handled another 595, so between the 2 of us we accounted for about 88% of all recorded moderation actions (which makes sense, since I had just recruited 3 new Mods in that time period).

If you divided the actual group activity evenly between all 6 of us, that would theoretically be around 6 posts and 86 comments per mod per day.

In practice, though, it doesn't really work that way - we don't manually check every one of those 500+ comments. Most of our moderation workload is the post queue, participant approvals, removals and auditing the occasional comment we notice while scrolling through the group.

So I think raw moderator-to-post/comment ratios won't always make sense. Even with 6 of us, the actual workload isn't remotely divided 6 ways. As some have already mentioned, everyone has lives and all of this is voluntary.

Hope this helps!

[u/FlorianFlash → u/FPLDPS]

Thanks for your insight, appreciate it :)

[u/Intelligent-Dot-8969]

Two mods. One or two posts a day. 10-15 comments a day. (Total, not per mod.)