For those who may have missed by previous posts, my name is Sarah Gilbert. I used AskHistorians as a case study in my dissertation work and I’ve been sharing some of my findings here. In the first two posts I addressed learning and knowledge sharing through AskHistorians as well as how AskHistorians’ location on reddit affects participation in the sub. Peppered through these posts is the work mods do to support our learning experiences and maintain AskHistorians as a safe space to get good history. If you’re a regular reader like me, you see evidence of their work every day, and I’m not just talking about [removed], [removed], [removed]! As we read AskHistorians we see mods responding to questions, posting regular features, and if we’re looking closely, reviewing applications for flair. Clearly, the team of 37 mods (37!!!) managing a subreddit 870, 561 subscribers strong must be among the hardest working on reddit, right? As I found out, we readers don’t know the half of it. In this post I’m going to address the visible and invisible work moderators do, talk a bit about how reddit’s interface and culture affects this work, and share what they told me about why they do it.

Positionality

The first post provided a brief overview on the methodology I used in my dissertation work (link to the full dissertation is here). Since the data sources and analysis are the same, I’m not going to include that information again here. However, my position relative to the work shared in this post is different than the first two. A quick recap on what I mean by positionality: one way to increase transparency and reduce bias in qualitative research is for the researcher to reflect on how their own characteristics and experiences affect their interpretation of the data. In my case, I’ve never moderated a subreddit or any other online community, so much of what I learned from the AskHistorians mods was new and, at times, surprising to me. As a reddit user (I first started using the site in 2012) I gravitate towards heavily moderated subs and am thus biased in favour of strict moderation. Prior to working with AskHistorians I was (and remain) very supportive of its moderation style. In my dissertation I took efforts to mitigate this bias by reporting what I was told; however, while this post will focus on findings from my dissertation, unlike the dissertation it won’t be presented with an entirely neutral stance.

Visible and invisible work

In the title I made reference to the idea of work as either visible or invisible. When we think of something as “work” it’s typically an activity during which some degree of effort is expended. The value and legitimacy of work is commonly tied to how visible that effort is to others. For example, when effort is unseen (such as maintaining a smile when serving rude customers) or are viewed as an “act of love” or “natural behaviour” (such as raising children) it may not be viewed as work and thus rendered invisible.

These examples are of work made invisible by social and cultural norms. In technological spaces the design of the platform itself can also make work visible or invisible (Star & Strauss, 1999). For example, on reddit no one sees you type, re-type, and ultimately delete a comment. However, given the same situation on an iPhone, the person you’re texting sees the little writing cloud thingy and might panic and blow up your phone if no message follows. The same activity (writing, but ultimately deleting a message) has different consequences in different spaces because the technological features of those spaces affects the action’s visibility.

While making work visible can provide legitimacy (as with child rearing) it may also have negative consequences, like added surveillance (as with the little writing bubble thingies). Most work is neither necessarily visible or invisible– rather, the visibility of work is highly dependent on context and vantage point. In this post, when I discuss the visibility of moderation work, it’s from the vantage point of readers.

Visible and invisible moderation work

Before I started this work, I assumed I had a decent grasp of what mods did, because (as I’ll discuss in greater detail below) much of their work is visible. Because I could see some of it, I must have kind of an idea of what it’s like, right?

I was wrong.

Quite wrong, actually.

However, I wasn’t the only one. Several mods I interviewed described a similar shock upon becoming mods, describing the transition from reader (or flair) to moderator as a paradigm shift, such as u/searocksandtrees:

I suddenly saw that this civilized, grown up, friendly corner of the internet I found wasn’t actually that at all! It was just as crap as everywhere else.

While feelings of shock upon becoming mod wasn’t a universal experience among those I spoke to, it does highlight how much goes on behind the scenes. As a reader, it’s easy to think that AskHistorians and other heavily moderated subs don’t attract people interested in shitposting, pun threads, or making pithy comments in response to complex topics. However, because they can see all the comments coming in, moderators know that they do indeed attract users with these habits and that when a post is highly upvoted, that these users will make these kinds of comments en masse, like the time u/Elm11 was inspired to do the math.

While we, the readers, can’t see the content of the removed comments, we can see that some comments are removed. Removing comments is probably the most notorious of all the mod’s visible work. That this work is visible is an effect of reddit’s design. Rather than comments disappearing quietly from view, like Trotsky from a photograph, comments (with responses) that are removed from reddit are emblazoned with the epitaph, “removed” and thus highly visible (like Trotsky’s expulsion from the Community Party). Further exacerbating the issue is that prior to clicking on a link, the total number of comments is visible; however, in AskHistorians, there’s a very good chance this number does not reflect the actual number of comments that remain visible in the thread. This can cause confusion, as was expressed by this user in a removed comment:

where the fuck are all 180 of the comments

While showing how many comments are removed has the positive effect of maintaining transparency, it also creates invisible work for moderators. One reason it causes additional work is because AskHistorians’ rules and norms diverge from the remainder of reddit. As discussed in my last post, the norm across much of reddit is that users decide what content is seen and what is not through upvoting and downvoting. While regular AskHistorians readers understand that many comments will be removed, new users do not. As what happened in the post where u/Elm11 counted the number comments that were some version of “where are all the comments?” the visibility of removing comments can create a vicious feedback loop, where people see that comments have been removed and then leave even more comments that break the rules, thus necessitating the removal of even more rule-breaking comments.

Issues arising from comment removal also stem from another conflict between AskHistorians’ norms and reddit’s technology: while it can take very little time for a popular question to get upvoted to the front page of reddit, it can take a long time to write a comprehensive response to a question. In one example, a mod I spoke to described biking to a nearby library to access a paywalled journal article he wanted to consult to respond to a question. The disconnect between the time it takes for a question to reach the front page and the time it takes to write a response can be seen in this removed comment:

6 hours 9k upvotes. pitty it doesnt look like anyone can provide an answer to OP. i guess that’s an accomplishment? have something unique enough to stump everyone!

This disconnect results in complaints that questions never get answered, in part because it’s easy for a question to hit the front page before someone has had a chance to answer it. As most readers enter AskHistorians when they see a highly upvoted post on their own front page they’re often seeing questions when they’re popular rather than answers when they’re given. In another amazing example of mostly invisible work, we know questions get answered because u/Georgy_K_Zhukov did the research, analyzing the top 50 posts each month over the course of two years to find an average 96% response rate (among other interesting results). We also know that despite complaints such as the one above, mods have been known to respond to questions with astonishing speed, such as this recent two-part, 1770-word answer given by u/commiespaceinvader, which was posted around 3.5 hours after the question was asked. Conducting research, writing responses, and constant assessment of the state of the sub are all further examples of the invisible (research and assessment) and visible (posting responses and results) work mods do in addition to enforcing the rules.

While enforcing the rules and writing responses were among the most time-consuming tasks mods described, they also mentioned conducting other behind-the-scenes work. For example, some of the mods I interviewed described acting as information brokers. Because they have a good sense of where expertise lies in the community, mods will alert those with expertise in a given area when a relevant question is asked. As another example, evaluating the quality of answers sometimes requires some level of expertise in the area. If the quality of an answer is in question, mods discuss whether it should be removed or remain. They also respond to modmail queries and PMs. These can range from explaining why a comment was removed, to providing feedback on how to improve that comment, to recommending books and other sources, to providing professional advice.

Emotional labour

So far, the examples of invisible work I’ve discussed are invisible because they’re behind a virtual curtain. If we peeped behind it, we’d be able to see it happening. However, mods also engage in truly invisible work: emotional labour. Mods described two types of interactions that required emotional labour: pushback from users and online abuse.

Pushback needed not be aggressive or abusive to have a negative impact, as described by u/CommodoreCoCo:

There are particularly aggressive people and outrageous people where you’re just like, I didn’t know that there were that many people who had those words in their vocabulary still! And those are actually, for me, easier to deal with because there’s no like, bad feelings about that. Like, you used 15 racial slurs in your 16-word sentence; I don’t feel bad about banning you. It’s the people who are more frustrating and more annoying who just think they’re right and that their way to run the sub is better and ‘you guys just don’t know how to do this’ and ‘stop suppressing free speech’ and ‘you’re on reddit so let the upvotes decide.’

As can be seen in the quote above, fielding complaints about the rules can be frustrating. The mods noted that, in their experience, most AskHistorians’ users were supportive of the sub’s rules, particularly because these users understand and support the rationale behind them. However, as I mentioned earlier, highly upvoted posts often result in an influx of new users who don’t know the rules, such as this person, whose comment was removed:

Are there usually so many removed comments here? I'm just popping in from /r/all, I don't frequent this subreddit.

Others may be aware that AskHistorians has strict rules, but don’t like them, such as this person:

boooo. i'd rather have some speculation or anecdotes than [deleted]x500. but i'm just a lowly non-historian from r/all. sorry for adding to your workload by giving you another comment to delete. it's lonely here.

u/CommodoreCoCo goes on to describe the long-term effects of such pushback:

it can get very depressing and, yeah . . . Depressing and disheartening and it makes you want to take a break for a bit because you know, you don’t want that pushback and you can’t take that pushback after a certain point.

u/CommodoreCoCo is still an active mod, suggesting that even though pushback can be exhausting there’s something about moderation work that makes it all worthwhile. But I’ll get to that in a bit. While pushback was more commonly described as argumentation regarding the rules, mods also described receiving pushback in response to answers they’d provided. u/commiespacerinvader described how this form of pushback also required emotional labour:

It can be difficult to maintain a semi-professional tone etc. when one is confronted with upright hostility because of the content of my answers or because of moderation.

While pushback is sometimes innocuous, it may also be abusive. Abuse experienced by the mods runs the gamut from mild to severe. Some examples of name-calling that were removed from a popular thread include this:

You are trying so hard to sound smart. I just imagine you as a typical neckbeards.

This:

ASK HISTORIANS MODS ARE F****TS

(I censored that comment– it was spelled out in the original. The formatting is the same though).

And this:

What a wonderful pile of shit, I mean subreddit! So nice to come from the front page, intrigued to learn, only to be greeted by a wasteland of banned users and removed comments. Congrats dipshit mods, this subreddit is pretty much rendered worthless. Could you help me out at least once before I go? How do I add this piece of shit place to a blocked list of sorts, so that I never see it on my front page again?? Thanks!

There are way more examples from that thread but I’m going to stop at three. While abusive name-calling may be common, abuse may also take the form of death and/or rape threats and doxxing, such as this death threat recounted by one mod:

Many of us, especially those commenting and moderating some of the more sensitive topics such as Holocaust denial or anything to do with sexism have also received unsolicited pms hurling insults at us and further. I once had a user message me 200 times in 40 minutes detailing how they would dismember and eat me after I had banned them from the sub [emphasis added].

In my previous post I described some of the effects reddit’s norms and technology can have on AskHistorians, particularly when it comes to participation among certain groups. Another effect of these norms is that they provide scaffolding for the development of bigoted communities whose members (or those who are like-minded) abuse those whose work runs contrary to their beliefs. The risk of being abused or exposed to other threatening behaviour led one mod I spoke to take precautionary measures, such as identity management.

Mod responses to abuse varied; however, a common reaction was to minimize and/or normalize it. Minimization may happen because not all abuse is equally severe. For example, some mods described finding humor in the some of the abusive messages sent, such as this example:

You do occasionally get comedic ones, like the time that somebody was really mad at me and so looked at my flair and decided that I had to be a 20-something [redacted country] man living in my mother’s basement and kind of dying because not only do I not meet any of those criteria, but my mother was actually living in my basement at the time! (Anna)

It also may be that it felt minimal in comparison to what was expected:

It’s not as bad as I thought it might be. There’s less of it that’s intentional rather than simply young people who haven’t been exposed to other ideas yet (James Brooks).

While minimization did occur, normalizing abuse and other negative effects of managing disruptive behaviour was more common, and is illustrated in this statement by u/Elm11:

Some of it you just get really sick of discovering how many racists we deal with on a day to day basis. It just becomes normalized. It’s perfectly normal for me to see people denying the Holocaust on a daily basis, because why wouldn't you, right? Like, stuff that really shouldn’t be just normal kind of is.

Other mods described tuning out abuse and other disruptive behaviour or described it as white noise. While they didn’t discuss it explicitly in terms of normalization, it’s possible that finding humour in, and minimizing the effects of disruptive behaviour are also normalization tactics that help mods cope with negative aspects of their work.

Why do they do it?

Clearly, moderation work requires a lot of time and effort, and risks exposure to online abuse and other disruptive behaviour. Yet, a good chunk of this team of 37 people spend hours of their day every day working to make the sub better. Why? There are several reasons. First, and foremost, is supporting AskHistorians’ mission of public history. Many of the mods I spoke to described the mission as highly motivating, and often as their most important motivation, such as u/mimicofmodes:

My basic motivation for involvement with AskHistorians is that I love the mission - it's the most direct method of public history out there.

In the last post, I described how AskHistorians serves as a public history site and the role of the rules in establishing it as such. Thus, enforcing the rules, (i.e., a large chunk of moderation work) was also described highly motivating. For example, u/mimicofmodes went on to say,

I want to help keep it great by doing the strict moderation we're famous (and loved!) for.

AskHistorians’ rules do more than ensure that question askers get high quality responses to their questions; they also ensure that questions are asked in a safe environment. Often the victims of online abuse themselves, mods described being motivated by ensuring that question askers were shielded from abuse or other disruptive behaviour, such as u/searocksandtrees:

It’s this kind of protective instinct, I think. I want to make sure that nothing bad is happening. I don’t want people insulting the OP. People should feel safe to ask questions. I don’t want them getting attacked. They often get criticized for asking dumb questions and stuff . . . So, I’m kind of on patrol making sure . . . that nobody is coming in and being hurt.

In addition to maintaining AskHistorians as a safe space in which to engage in public history, many (although not all) also described the important role the friendships they’d made played in sustaining participation, such as former mod and current flaired user, u/bitparity:

I would say that is the number one reason for continued involvement. I like the people I'm hanging out with.

These friendships provide several functions. For example, some mods described receiving professional support, such as u/CommodoreCoCo, who discussed his struggles as a doctoral student with other mods:

talking with them about interests and problems and things they had experienced was really helpful and kind of giving me confidence that I had made a good choice [in pursuing a PhD].

Friendships between the mods also provided important social support. For example, AskHistorians was often described as one of the few places mods had to discuss their love of history (this aspect of AskHistorians wasn’t unique to mods– other participants described this important function of the sub as well). And finally, friendships also provided emotional support. This was particularly important when coping with abuse and other disruptive behaviour, as can be seen in this statement by u/commiespaceinvader:

Being able to talk about these things and voice these feelings of awfulness almost immediately as well as voice the desire to throw the lap top across the room in the setting of a group of people who understand these emotions and are supportive of expressing them, show understanding, and support self-care was and remains a major part of what makes me continue my participation.

Finally, while it wasn’t described as a particularly important reason for participating, many of the mods I spoke to found positive feedback from community members to be rewarding. Sometimes positive feedback was quantitative (i.e., upvotes and gold). Because reaching a broad audience to share their knowledge was highly motivating for several of the mods and flairs I spoke to, upvotes served as an indication that this goal had been achieved:

. . . the idea of points, the idea of gold, those are really attractive in that because they give you a tangible way to measure whether that mission, whether it’s a popular topic, whether an answer has connected with people, and so I think that helps out in giving a concrete way to measure whether I’m succeeding or not (James Brooks).

Feedback from the community could also be qualitative (i.e., comments and messages). For example, u/Elm11 describes the importance of community support:

we’re lucky to have a subreddit that really does love the moderator community, which is great. And our regulars think we’re great and we really appreciate that because we need validation too!

So, if you’re reading this, appreciate the work mods do, and want to lend your support consider thanking them for it! Allow me to start:

Mods, clearly supporting my dissertation work has been tremendously important to me. Early participation in my recruitment thread showed that you were supportive of the work, and many of you contributed hours of your time to tell me about your participation on AskHistorians. Your comments in meta posts and the research you’ve done provided me with incredibly valuable information that provided rich context for my findings. However, I’d also like to thank you for the broader impact of the work you do. As a reader I’ve learned so much; in addition to learning from your intellectual contributions to the sub, I’ve also learned much more about how history is practiced. But more broadly, you’ve created and fostered a unique intellectual space that bridges gaps between interested readers, knowledgeable laypeople, and academics and have done so at a massive scale. Because of the work you do AskHistorians has grown into an exemplar of public scholarship that all fields can learn from. Thank you for all you do. ^{And also for the flair!}

Reference

Star, S. L. & Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 9-30.