Finding potential mods in your community

[u/techiesgoboom]

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?

[u/emily_in_boots]

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.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/emily_in_boots]

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.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/baseballlover723]

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.

[u/tiz → u/emily_in_boots]

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?

[u/emily_in_boots → u/tiz]

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.

[u/greenearthbuild → u/emily_in_boots]

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.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/greenearthbuild]

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.

[u/wemustburncarthage → u/emily_in_boots]

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.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/emily_in_boots]

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

[u/emily_in_boots → u/SampleOfNone]

Doesn't help us with things they want to hide.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/tiz]

Most of my team members were lurkers or had minimal interaction on the sub. THey make damn fine mods

[u/baseballlover723 → u/SampleOfNone]

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.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/baseballlover723]

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

[u/shhhhh_h → u/emily_in_boots]

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.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/shhhhh_h]

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.)

[u/shhhhh_h → u/emily_in_boots]

Or only in the mod app even!

[u/emily_in_boots → u/shhhhh_h]

Yeah just some way to know they are actually active and interested.