I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.
One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.
So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.
Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.
I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.
One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.
So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.
Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.