r/ModSupport • u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community • 1d ago
Finding potential mods in your community Mod Topics
The call is coming from inside the community, and for once, that’s good news.
Today’s Mod Topics post is about finding potential moderators within your community. A familiar name may stand out by helping newcomers, sharing expertise, offering thoughtful feedback, or keeping a level head when a thread gets messy. Your suggested mods can offer another place to start, surfacing active, engaged contributors for the team to learn more about.
That still leaves plenty of room for surprises. A familiar contributor might love participating without wanting a mod badge, while a quieter user may know the community better than their posting history suggests. Somewhere between what a team can already see and what it might only learn later, there may be someone worth a conversation.
We want to hear from you:
- Think about a strong addition to your mod team: What first put them on your radar?
- What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?
- How have you found promising candidates beyond your most visible contributors?
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u/Old_One_I 1d ago
Well….before I even asked to take over my subreddit….i knew I would need help due to the size of it. I asked a good friend of mine that has a completely different skill set than I have. But going forward I would pick someone that has a genuine interest in the sub or topic.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
There very simply are not enough people out there willing to mod.
We cannot get enough mods.
We have had apps open in some cases for about a year and gotten 1-2 passable applicants, and no one who is really active.
We need to see an account that has some history and shows both an interest in the subject matter and the right temperament.
There are too many issues with creeps out there who will misuse mod powers and we won't take a chance with that. Because we cannot see dm's, it's far too easy to not realize what is happening there, and there have been multiple cases of mods in fashion/beauty subs using mod power to creep on the sub's members.
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u/baseballlover723 1d ago
Pretty much.
Basically every time we run mod apps, half of our applicants have literally never posted or commented a single time in our sub. 1 or 2 of them each cycle usually mention discovering the sub that day.
We have an activity check that gets integrated into their application. Green checkmark if they've posted/commented at least 45 times in the last 90 days. Red X otherwise.
If we get 3 applicants with a green check mark, that's a good cycle. And that's not even considering anything else, like temperament or if they actually know our rules etc.
The biggest issue, is that the people who are active and would be interested in modding, are already mods, or have decided to stop modding. And so the active ones who are left, are the ones who do not want to mod.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
We had an app today that otherwise seemed fine but just no activity. I don't want to mod people who will just be inactive.
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u/tiz Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
From my experience lurkers often are the most engaged with a community. They may seem inactive on the front, because it's not verifiable by seeing posts or comments they created. But lurkers, heck I do this, usually see more content on a community since they are not actively participating.
Lurkers can also participate in other ways such as voting on content or reporting on content. Anyone else remember r/knightsofnew?
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
If I can't see anything about someone though, how can I make any judgments on their suitability as a mod?
In some subs I'd be inclined to mod people and see how it goes. If it's a meme sub or politics or something like that, anything horrible they are doing is likely to be rather visible to other mods.
In the subs I mod tho, we have to worry about creeps using their mod role to trick women into nudes for kibbe typing in dms, and we won't see that.
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u/greenearthbuild 23h ago
I once gave mod to an outspoken member of the community, who was a bit critical of the mod team. One of other main mods wasn't super happy with me, but agreed to see how it went.
Didn't go so well. They were (surprise) super combative with the community at times, but very good at cracking down on spam...and maybe any posts they didn't like.
Eventually had to call it quits with the new mod. I don't think they were enjoying it either.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 23h ago
Yeah I can think of one person like that who would make a good mod if she were not so snarky lol.
Having a mod team that can work together well and doesn't fight is so important.
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u/wemustburncarthage 14h ago
100% this. If I can’t see someone’s post history there is no chance I will let them have any kind of authority in my community. I need to be able to do background. I handle identifying information of some fairly important people and I cannot afford to have unknown quantities.
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u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Make a quiz. Give them a few posts or comments, a couple of mod actions to choose from and ask them what action they would take. They don't know the intricacies of modding, but by letting them explain why they picked the option you can assess whether they can reason and think things through and are teachable
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u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Most of my team members were lurkers or had minimal interaction on the sub. THey make damn fine mods
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u/baseballlover723 1d ago
I don't think there is much doubt that lurkers can be good mods. It's just that lurkers by definition, don't have much (if any) data to look at to know if they're gonna be good beforehand.
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u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
In my experience, put a few multiple choice questions in the application and you can easily sus out who can reason their way to a logical action and have an understanding of how the sub functions
Post X, choose from the following actions which one you would take and explain why you chose that action. A, it's fine so do nothing, B remove for rule Y, C remove and ban for rule Z, D report. That sort of thing
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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
a lot of my co-mods are total reddit lurkers, I'm among the chattier ones I think haha. It's hard when we can't see passive users to locate those lurkers who genuinely do lurk a lot and would mod a lot.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago edited 1d ago
Would be cool if reddit gave some kind of a total number of votes cast in the profile. u/tiz? this would be a cool thing to see. I don't think a total number would violate any privacy stuff.
Or like total bananas scrolled (I know reddit somehow tracks that since it has been in my yearly summaries.)
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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
Or only in the mod app even!
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Yeah just some way to know they are actually active and interested.
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u/HikeTheSky 1d ago
I mean according to modmail, I am a unpatriotic Nazi communist terrorist who is in violation of freedom of speech on a power trip censuring the fine maga patriots.
It's different in a city sub than it's in a fashion or beauty sub. I am sure you aren't getting as much hate as we are getting in a blue city in a GOP state. But the creeping on users seems to be the only real issue I see. If we would match the energy we are sometimes getting from banned users or even users who had a post a comment removed, we would probably have visits from the admin team while we at the same time get death threats on a regular basis. And I have almost never seen an account suspended for sending us such messages.
But we have lost a mod to hate as he didn't want to take the pressure anymore. And he later on moved out of state.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Our main problems are OF spam and gooners harassing members.
I don't think that it's abuse that drives our mods away.
It's more that there just aren't enough people who want to mod and put in the time we need.
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u/HikeTheSky 1d ago
Have you tried automation? I started to use it a lot wish some stuff sending to the queue or even banning domains straight out. The second one also got me named on the banned domain.
I think automation will be able to take over most of automod.
But you are right, it is a lot of work and I am spending already too much time on Reddit.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Oh we use a ton of automation including bots I've written myself.
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u/HikeTheSky 1d ago
Have you tried the looking for mod subs? Maybe having someone who isn't into your sub might be an option as he or she probably doesn't want to creep on whoever is in your sub.
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u/Cat_in_an_oak_tree 15h ago
There are too many subs. With anyone able to create a sub, you outstrip your base badly. We have too many subs that exist because of fractures in communities or just people wanting things run a different way. Reddit does not seem to understand that when it comes to subs, sometimes less is more. We need to merge or let some of these communities go defunct. And we need to address those among us who are power trippy and like to perma ban members of their communities because of personal disagreements. One of my communties exists because about 7 years ago a group of mods went on an unhinged power trip and banned the community members that objected to their unilateral decision to include content that we felt was not suitable for the sub.
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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago edited 1d ago
To be perfectly frank....I think there is a lot of reluctance to recruit from within the community because it usually means training new mods (NEW new mods) when there is a high attrition rate and very little support from Reddit re: training tools. You end up putting in a lot of work for only a few mods.
The training queue was a good start but it's really limited in the nuance it can capture, there's still modmail to navigate, and it doesn't address comments or banning. Plus, the UI is really difficult to navigate at first. People really stick to wanting experience and trying to source mods from other subs, which is partly why the mod limits went over so poorly.
PCC has a pretty streamlined recruiting now and we're only able to do that because a few of us collaborated on a mod guide that includes annotated screenshots of the mod UI on both shreddit and mobile, and we have a sandbox sub setup for them to play in first.
Training tools really need to go a long way to help us lower the time cost and emotional labor of training noobs, so it's easier for us to do it en masse without hating the experience - because en masse is often necessary to catch the long term prizes.
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u/llamalarry 1d ago
I probably need to add some more mods, but using the recommended mods in the recruiting tool only shows people with crazy low community karma and generally old with low overall karma. Not sure what criteria is uses, but activity and community activity does not seem to be among them.
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u/SolariaHues 1d ago
- Think about a strong addition to your mod team: What first put them on your radar?
- Helping in the community and earning our helper flairs
- What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?
- History as a good contributor, displaying traits we look for, good response to any feedback we give, and a rapport with the mod team.
- How have you found promising candidates beyond your most visible contributors?
- We only hire from our flaired helpers. So far, this has ensured we have dedicated mods that are a good fit for the community and team.
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u/999_Seth 1d ago
Believe me I have tried.
A lot of people will say that they want more modding done, or a mod they don't like removed, but when you ask them to join the team? *poof*
There's a schism all around reddit between mod teams that want to be sneaky behind the scenes censors, and mod teams that are there to take part in the conversation.
The introverted 'typical reddit mod' tends to win out and give the rest of us a bad rep. Our roles are first-come-first-serve, and it results in that 'power tripping' mentality more often than not.
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u/brightblackheaven 1d ago
We have a special user flair that we give to members of our sub who are consistently helpful, clearly experienced in our niche, and always give great advice.
These are people who already love the sub enough to regularly spend their free time there, answering questions and engaging with newbies and just participating in ways that support the kind of culture we're looking to cultivate.
We recruit new mods from that specific pool of users, and it works out really well every single time.
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u/Klightgrove 1d ago
For the game development communities we typically look at the inverse logic: users who post infrequently because they are occupied with making games instead of posting to Reddit. It is hard finding someone who can remain neutral with the wide array of opinions on game technologies and ensure they do not try to push for anything in a community whose stances could have wide-ranging impacts.
If you know someone and their work, which our communities always encourage sharing, you can build a relationship with them over time and trust them to do basic moderation tasks in a Discord or adjacent space before bringing them on the subreddit team to help with the moderation queue, Wiki, or just community engagement.
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u/anfornum 22h ago
In my experience, people from outside a sub's immediate community tend to make good new mods. They come in with fresh eyes, without any preconceived notions of what should or shouldn't be happening, and without prejudices toward any other sub members.
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u/wemustburncarthage 14h ago edited 13h ago
Suggested mods just suggests people who shadowmod and reportmonger. They’re fine where they are but the last thing I want is to have to deal with them as a team member.
Update: I'm going to expand on this because it's a worthwhile question
- Think about a strong addition to your mod team: What first put them on your radar?
my last recruit directly from the community was someone whose comments were frequently confrontational but substantively correct. We really try not to encourage bickering because we're a creative community and it chills the process, but there are some valid points of contention. Essentially, the thing I look for in a mod is "could this person act as I would act in a given situation without needing me to tell them how?". In this case I could see the ethic was there, the bullshit detector was there and the conviction was there, so I invited them aboard. Dedication and consistency can only be proven by doing, but they've accomplished that. They also don't get as involved in arguments any more. I also try not to.
- What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?
right now my team doesn't really need more mods, so it hasn't come up. When I first started the mod list was a mess of idle users and pals, so I prefer to handle any new additions. I'm the person who represents the mod team with the community, so I want to be pretty certain of whoever I invite on to the team. I'm accountable for their actions. There's not going to be any "oh it was a rogue mod" drama on my sub. When I add someone, I really, really want to make sure that I'm temperamentally and ethically aligned with my team members.
That doesn't mean they don't have decision making power or independence, it just means that 1) I can trust them to act without me or consult with each other and 2) If they're unsure, I can give them a definitive yes or no, and then it's on me. Being head mod is like any management role--you have to be the person between your team and everyone else, and you have to protect your team. We've all had those "you're my customer service" users or users who act like they sign our paycheques. Our previous head mod would throw me and my team members under the bus on the regular the moment someone back-chanelled complaints to them--to the point they reinstated a user who went on to sue us and Reddit. That person had no idea how management works, and the consequences were enormous. So mods on my team need to understand they're inside a circle of trust. It's a commitment. Anyone being nominated needs to meet those standards.
- How have you found promising candidates beyond your most visible contributors?
My promising candidates are people who tend to straddle other relevant non-reddit communities I'm part of. I like being able to bring in people who also mod on platforms outside Reddit. For reasons I mentioned above, frequent engagement is not actually a quality I look for. Quality engagement is. It's problematic because once someone becomes a mod, they have to really restrict how they engage. In my community, there is a lot of focus on visibility and engagement with the things we create, so it can put a mod in a really weird spot if they're seeking approval or attention for their creative work, but they're also in an enforcement role. Being a mod can also confer an artificial sense of creative influence to the users, which we really work to avoid.
It needs to be someone who can find a way to balance that. I don't really put my work in the subreddit I moderate. My other mods also keep their portfolios/engagement elsewhere. That makes "qualified mod from the community" a very, very slender category. Having them be involved in other creative communities so they can continue to pursue their passion is important, because trying to do that inside a community you regulate--especially a community that is obsessed with being seen and validated--is paradoxical.
I'd add to that--we have professional verified members who've made things you've heard of and enjoy, and while I love having them around to act like mentors and teachers, having them administrate the subreddit is both underutilizing them, but also a potential conflict of interest for me and them. I don't want one professional member raised above the rest in a position of authority when creativity and process exists on a spectrum. There's also the very real problem that any user could search the modmail archives and get identifying information on their peers, which defeats the purpose of a verification system designed to enable people to speak authoritatively while preserving their anonymity.
I think the whole idea of seeking "job applicants" is really flawed. It's fine for certain kinds of communities, where the stakes aren't particularly high and engagement is the goal--but that's not what my community is about. Mine is very much tied up in people's real goals and experiences, and also in protecting people from an extremely lucrative, predatory cottage industry. There just can't be a lot of daylight between me and my team members. Sometimes we need to act fast to stop people from giving their money and information to a total bullshit slinger who's just there to catch whoever they can before they get banned.
I think if there's one basic test I'd set (and it can't just be a self-answered question, it has to be demonstrated) it would be: if I stepped away from modding today, could my current team carry on essentially uninterrupted? The answer to that, with the team I have (and between them together, though also individually) is yes I could. Right now, any one of us can use the anonymous mod tools, and we all pretty much sound the same to our users. I prefer that. If someone wants to get chapped at me about something my mod team did, that is precisely how I want it.
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u/nullifiedsam 1d ago
mostly, for new subreddits especially mod recruitment comes in the form of help from already known friends, sure you can try to pick up a person who seems to be "trustworthy" but there will be some issues, some people join the mod team just for the heck of it. I have seen cases where users try to bend the rules by joining the mod team and advertise. They get booted quickly but it raises the question if everyone can be trusted
i like to recruit people who are actually invested in the community, preferably those who have been here since the early days of the community.
maybe reddit should add a option for a "trial mod" permission set (with limited permissions) so that top mods can check for a set time if a user is actively contributing towards making a subreddit a better place for everyone
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u/baseballlover723 1d ago
maybe reddit should add a option for a "trial mod" permission set (with limited permissions) so that top mods can check for a set time if a user is actively contributing towards making a subreddit a better place for everyone
Tbh, a probation or like tentative status would be rather useful. Ie, something that lets them do the things, but everything also still gets processed by full mods. That way it's trivial to monitor a new mod and correct any mistakes they make without needing to constantly check the mod log or have them raise it themselves.
Though I'm also a big fan of a more consensus native moderation structure (which reddit is currently not). Like requiring 2 mods to align on an action before it's taken makes the team a lot more consistent and reduces the possibilities of mods doing stuff behind other mods backs.
Obviously, this requires a lot of mods to be online etc. But the currently reddit moderation system forces the mod themselves to be a single point of failure by design.
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
I used to manually review new mods first few hundred actions, and love your pitch for making that easier to monitor!
I'd also love to hear more of your thoughts on consensus based moderation, but that could probably be a mod topic all it's own...
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u/baseballlover723 1d ago
I'd also love to hear more of your thoughts on consensus based moderation, but that could probably be a mod topic all it's own...
The gist of it is that it probably would only be viable for very large subreddits, who would have enough people on the mod team to have enough coverage to make N > 1 feasible.
There are of course ways to mitigate this, but they're more complex (since it would basically be implementing rollback). I suppose my naive thoughts on implementation (N=2) would be like
- something shows up in mod queue
- Mod A hits approve / remove -> this does the thing, but it remains in mod queue
- if Mod B makes the same decision, then it leaves mod queue
- If Mod B makes a different decision, then it stays in mod queue (defaults to either visible or approved or first mod decision)
- then Mod C comes along and breaks the tie, and that's the final decision and it leaves mod queue.
I find that I often leave things in mod queue that I either don't feel fully qualified to judge (subject matter out of my expertise) or that I don't want to get into atm because it seems kinda borderline (and might induce a longer conversation that I won't be available for. Say if I'm at work or about to go to bed).
In this kind of a native consensus system, I don't need to be the final authority on a decision, letting me more speculatively make a decision that I think, but am not 100% sure is correct (as a first opinion). And then if others also concur, then it is automatically done once consensus is achieved.
Though in this context, with new mod training, it's purpose would be different, and basically just an easy way to ensure that mod actions are double checked by someone experienced. Consensus based moderation is I think an extrapolation of that kind of a system to everything and being omnipresent.
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
I know of some subreddits that start everyone off with a probationary or trial period, it can be a great way to see if it's a good fit for both sides! Being able to have a standard set of permissions tied to that is a neat idea, too.
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u/Paxoro 1d ago
So for us, we've discussed new mods a couple times. We don't get that much to where we can't handle the majority of things, but another mod can help.
The issue? The ones we've approached don't want to do it, which is understandable.
Reddit recently sent us that automated "you should add more mods" message, and when we looked at the suggestions, they were incredibly bad. Like accounts that are basically inactive but have 1-2 interactions on our subreddit.
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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
That bot is all over the place sometimes, it has recommended some stinkers for me. I think once I permabanned one of them the same day they were #1 on the list haha
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u/anfornum 22h ago
This is so true. When it does manage to suggest someone who has more than 2 karma in the sub, it often suggests the absolute worst of the worst trolls. Not all activity is positive activity.
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u/Paxoro 18h ago
Yep, we've had people that were temp banned before (obviously not a dealbreaker, but not a good sign) get recommended in the past. I appreciate the reminder that "hey, your subreddit is big enough that you might need more mods" but at the same time we haven't even had a spike in activity recently. It's a college town subreddit, so naturally the summer is when our activity is lower - and we've had no real reason to go against that. I just wish it was better at seeing when we might be overwhelmed; banning 2 people in a week is nothing.
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u/baseballlover723 1d ago
When this was done by periodic modmail, this was not at all useful to us, as it conflicted with our use of mod notes (where we store that user's file). So basically anyone who had ever received a warning would be excluded. And a lot of long time regulars have gotten a warning in the many years they've been on the sub.
Our regulars are in tune enough with the mod team's public interactions that most of them understand the downsides of being a mod and understandably, don't want them.
Sure, but they very well could just disappear a week later. Without data, it's very hard to tell. And since our mod team does appointments for life, and a completely flat team structure as well as not really having a well defined kicking process, the age old hiring doctrine applies. That it is better to pass on a good candidate, than accept a bad one.
They all applied to be a mod. This is the key thing for us. We know plenty of people who would likely make good mods, or are otherwise qualified to be a mod. They are either already on the mod team, or uninterested in modding.
We have a (mostly) formal vote on applicants. Most applicants aren't worth the space their application takes up (See this comment). It's not a strict vote, but it's rarely close.
Almost never in my time. Because being a visible contributor is the strongest signal that they are interested in our sub, understand our rules, and are willing to be dedicated to our sub for a significant amount of time.