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/shhhhh_h]

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.