What a thankless job monitoring Reddit must be⌠if you moderate too much, youâre gonna have Godwinâs Law invoked on you inside of 5 minutes, and if you moderate too little, youâre going to get called all kinds of names for âdefendingâ things simply because you havenât deleted them yet. I donât envy that job for a second.
And these two classes often overlap to a pretty significant degree.
Wow, I absolutely love the idea of this service. I think I could both use their services and volunteer for them. There have been tons of times Iâve just walked away from situations because I didnât feel like I should be so insistent. I rationalize with âNot worth my timeâ but really standing up for myself just makes me super uncomfortable. On the other hand, standing up for someone else doesnât make me the slightest bit uncomfortable, and Iâm sure I can be hell to deal with.
What I love about the idea the most, though, is that I think that currently bad customer service is a rewarding strategy for businesses. The goal of customer service is to make people go away. Whether thatâs by appeasing them or frustrating them doesnât matter. I like the idea that whenever a company decides it would be easier to frustrate than to appease they would suddenly have to deal with someone who is harder to frustrate. I want people who are often frustrated by customer service to have a weapon to turn this into an arms race. What great about this potential arms race is that itâs terrible for the company who is sinking time into it, but, done properly, itâs actually delightful for the person who is fighting against them. How cathartic to get to be completely inconsiderate and feel good about doing it!
Do difficult, stressful work that helps people in a big way? Why should you be paid for that? Welcome to the 21c.
I know, I used to volunteer on crisis hotlines which basically fits the description you just gave. Unfortunately work pays based on: 1) how much it enriches the already wealthy; and 2) how little people want to do it. When it comes to work that is directly about caring about other people, even though itâs stressful, the world just seems to be full of people who feel compelled to do it. I mean, if you are going to go home feeling good about yourself because you genuinely helped people today, then presumably we can subtract the worth of that feeling to you from your paycheck and youâll still do the job, right?
Thanks capitalism!
In another internet lifetime I moderated a forum with 3-5000 posts a day. It was an utter pain in the ass, but I loved building community by carefully tweaking things. The right rules allow a lot of freedom, but you do have to skirt an edge around âjust donât be an assholeâ rules.
Dear sirs, canât tell you how disappointed I was in your âAssholes on Demandâ site. Youâve got a long way to go to compete with pornhub here.
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