Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Absolutely but my attitude eventually shifted to “this is a small Internet forum, you want to be a jackass do so elsewhere.” I always tried to find a form of balance because I did care about the users. But the balance did rely on gut feelings, perception, and how willing to put up with your shit I was. I spent most of my 20s doing this shit and yeah it feels wrong to say “if you’re a rude asshole in response to a mod decision you don’t like you’re less likely to get a favorable response” but also yeah the time it took to read an essay berating me was time I could spend on literally anything other than helping the person who wrote it and I did the thing of giving even those people the benefit of the doubt every time and turns out it was a waste of time because further investigation tended to reveal that the person was either a troll, an asshole who had a net negative impact on the community and a tenuous grasp on the rules, or someone unstable enough that they didn’t need a forum, they needed a support group with professional oversight.

But yeah when someone messaged me that one of the mods had been saying things that were inappropriate for a moderator of that community to say I spent months helping oust them and she and I are now actual friends.

I’ll also add that good moderation was a challenge because in my experience there’s four kinds of people who moderate: people who recognize it as a volunteer hobby and maintain an external life, people on a crusade, people who do their best but aren’t doing good mentally and probably need to be making major life changes, and bright eyed idealists. The first are what you want and the rarest, the second are a problem that you have to weed out because they become petty tyrants, the third can be ok or can be petty tyrants, and the fourth are the most common and they burn out in a month to three or rarely become one of the others. It’s hard to tell who will be which.