An Interview with a Reddit Moderator

Don’t work in community. Seriously. I never meant to become a community manager. Most of us didn’t. We fell into it sideways, like walking through the wrong door at a party and suddenly finding ourselves responsible for babysitting someone’s forgotten & drunk cousin.The job is a messy tapestry of contradictions. You'll build fences designed to be c... See more

One of the founding principles of Reddit was that it be a real place cultivated by real people instead of a fake place manicured by editors and other gatekeepers. Reddit is not a social media platform optimized for self-display; it is a community that rewards candor and honest advice. This is why millions of people trust Reddit for everything from ... See more

It’s easy to look at the hours and passion we’ve poured into these platforms over the years and beat ourselves up with Samuel Johnson’s maxim, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” But the problem with social media isn’t that we gave them our labor for free —that “labor” was for the people we cared about, not for social media’s shar... See more