Yeah, my model is that there only so much time a moderator wants to spend moderating, and if the quantity increases, then the time requirements will increase, until it is too much, and the moderator burns out. Even worse, the moment when the moderator gives up does not necessarily have to be the moment when the time requirements exceed some critical threshold; it may also be something unexpected than randomly happens on the moderator’s side—for example, the moderator gets fired from his job, or gets sick, or needs to take care about someone else getting sick; simply, something external will take away the extra attention he was giving to the forum so far.
Ideally, you would have a system where the moderator is not needed for its everyday functionality, only to solve exceptional situations. (By definition, exceptional situations happen rarely.) Then you can have moderators that won’t burn out.
A possible alternative is to have multiple moderators, but that opens another can of worms, if the moderators do not agree with each other about some details.
I think that Less Wrong is an example of a well-designed system. It helps that as a community we have the technical expertise to implement some technical solutions (even going to such extremes are rewriting the entire codebase from scratch), and enough money to pay someone to work on that full-time. So I understand that such solution is not available for everyone. (The Less Wrong code is freely available, but you still need some technical expertise to install it.) We have the community that votes, moderators have all kinds of software tools that make their jobs easier, and if a need arises, they can get new tools. That makes it sustainable.
(An example of a bad system that seems good is Reddit. It seems to work okay at first sight, but actually moderators gradually burn out, and there are a few power-hungry people who volunteer to act as a replacement, until you get hundreds of subreddits that are moderated by the same small group of people. No one is aware of this, until something blows up, and suddenly you get the same message censored across hundreds of seemingly unconnected subreddits.)
I tried to moderate a community (other than Less Wrong) once, and I gave up soon, because it was too much work to keep updating and configuring the software to avoid new exploits, while manually banning a few dedicated crazy people who kept manually creating new and new accounts (only to post the same kind of message and get banned instantly—but that always came a few hours lates, and required an intervention on my end; they kept doing this from different IP addresses).
So this is another problem: the difficulty of moderation does not increase continuously with the number of users or the volume of messages, but rather sooner or later you attract a crazy person with too much free time, and suddenly your have 10x more work overnight. (Which is also what happened to Less Wrong at one moment, and why the codebase had to be rewritten, because the existing tools just were not sufficient to fight that one individual, and it was difficult to implement new tools in the old code.)
I think that in general this is a serious problem that doesn’t have a good solution, yet. All communities seem one dedicated attack away from ruin, they are just lucky that the moment didn’t come yet. Maybe I am overly pessimistic here. But I would recommend to keep the requirements on the moderators close to zero, so that they can have their hands free for some exceptional action when the critical moment comes.
Yeah, my model is that there only so much time a moderator wants to spend moderating, and if the quantity increases, then the time requirements will increase, until it is too much, and the moderator burns out. Even worse, the moment when the moderator gives up does not necessarily have to be the moment when the time requirements exceed some critical threshold; it may also be something unexpected than randomly happens on the moderator’s side—for example, the moderator gets fired from his job, or gets sick, or needs to take care about someone else getting sick; simply, something external will take away the extra attention he was giving to the forum so far.
Ideally, you would have a system where the moderator is not needed for its everyday functionality, only to solve exceptional situations. (By definition, exceptional situations happen rarely.) Then you can have moderators that won’t burn out.
A possible alternative is to have multiple moderators, but that opens another can of worms, if the moderators do not agree with each other about some details.
I think that Less Wrong is an example of a well-designed system. It helps that as a community we have the technical expertise to implement some technical solutions (even going to such extremes are rewriting the entire codebase from scratch), and enough money to pay someone to work on that full-time. So I understand that such solution is not available for everyone. (The Less Wrong code is freely available, but you still need some technical expertise to install it.) We have the community that votes, moderators have all kinds of software tools that make their jobs easier, and if a need arises, they can get new tools. That makes it sustainable.
(An example of a bad system that seems good is Reddit. It seems to work okay at first sight, but actually moderators gradually burn out, and there are a few power-hungry people who volunteer to act as a replacement, until you get hundreds of subreddits that are moderated by the same small group of people. No one is aware of this, until something blows up, and suddenly you get the same message censored across hundreds of seemingly unconnected subreddits.)
I tried to moderate a community (other than Less Wrong) once, and I gave up soon, because it was too much work to keep updating and configuring the software to avoid new exploits, while manually banning a few dedicated crazy people who kept manually creating new and new accounts (only to post the same kind of message and get banned instantly—but that always came a few hours lates, and required an intervention on my end; they kept doing this from different IP addresses).
So this is another problem: the difficulty of moderation does not increase continuously with the number of users or the volume of messages, but rather sooner or later you attract a crazy person with too much free time, and suddenly your have 10x more work overnight. (Which is also what happened to Less Wrong at one moment, and why the codebase had to be rewritten, because the existing tools just were not sufficient to fight that one individual, and it was difficult to implement new tools in the old code.)
I think that in general this is a serious problem that doesn’t have a good solution, yet. All communities seem one dedicated attack away from ruin, they are just lucky that the moment didn’t come yet. Maybe I am overly pessimistic here. But I would recommend to keep the requirements on the moderators close to zero, so that they can have their hands free for some exceptional action when the critical moment comes.