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I never gave thought to the moderator position till this analysis.

I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators?

Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past.

To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for me) to see the long lasting value.

This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks

(HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)



Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past.

I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers.

It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really.

But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various engineering topics. I'm glad when we can help each other out by answering questions.

To be a moderator, ideally you're in it for the long term, by trying to guide your community in a good direction, educate people, uphold standards of good and civil discussion.


Do you manage time so that there is planned downtime? Like no moderating weekends or 8/40/5? Or is it a mostly 24/7 look-at-all-new-posts thing


There's only 65K subscribers, so it isn't a huge sub compared to others. And /r/AskEngineers is a pretty well-behaved bunch for the most part, so it isn't too hard.

I'm usually checking the new queue and moderation queue a couple times per day.

It's good to have multiple active moderators, who are in different timezones to provide better 24/7 coverage.


Meet the People Taking over Hacker News | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856 (Mar 2014, 286 comments)

Tell HN: New features and a moderator | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 (Jul 2016, 451 comments)




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