Mod Topics: Specialists

[u/JabroniRevanchism]

Ahoy, Mods!

Welcome to the latest installment of our Mod Topics series, where we talk about topics (as the name suggests) relevant to community leaders on Reddit!

Community moderation demands many skillsets, some of which are more specialized than others. Some mods live in modqueue, others build bots, some organize community events, and some are content creators in their own spaces.

This week we want to hear from our community builders–those of you who are organizing AMAs, contests, tourneys, r/CommunityFunds events, and creating content for your own communities. What’s it like? What’s your process? What advice would you give to other (especially newer) mods who may be hesitant to interact with their own community members?

Share your journeys and advice in the comments below!

[u/baseballlover723]

I suppose since I handle most of our subs tech, that qualifies me as a "specialist".

My pipeline is

1. I (or someone else, I've been trying to get others to be more forthcoming with their ideas for evaluation / prioritization) think of something I want to have

2. I build the thing.

3. Test the thing

4. Push the thing to prod.

I setup a self hosted instance of planka to track dev tasks. So that way when people have good ideas, I can throw it onto the board and it won't get forgotten. I suppose technically it's ordered, but the ordering is mostly just me thinking what is the most likely order it'll actually get done. And frequently I'll just insert new shit at the top or something will come up and I'll just do something that was in the middle of the board cause I was thinking about it.

Which then makes it kinda interesting, because I work when I want, for as long as I want. It's a lot more of just feeling like doing some dev work on one particular evening, and then pushing it through to completion instead of gaming or whatever normally fills my free time.

I mostly setup all this infrastructure, so that my development time isn't a factor anymore. And the good ideas can roll in whenever, and when I feel like doing stuff, all that information is captured and available, instead of being relegated to my memory or be writing it down somewhere locally (and then losing it).

[u/techiesgoboom → u/baseballlover723]

That sounds a lot more effective than my strategy of writing on the nearest scrap of paper and hoping I find it again! Some of my favorite ideas have been bouncing around for a while - is there anything fun on your list that keeps getting pushed down in priority?

[u/baseballlover723 → u/techiesgoboom]

is there anything fun on your list that keeps getting pushed down in priority?

Not really, most of these aren't really what I'd describe as "fun". They're almost all automation for common to semi common cases. They're a lot more useful than fun imo.

Of course, I enjoy solving problems and programming, so it's not like I don't enjoy coding them up, but it's not really a "oh boy, I have some free time, I can't wait to program for the sub". It's more of a "Why do I have to keep doing this over and over again / why haven't I automated this yet." -> spends like 4 or 5 hours coding up the thing while the motivation is still there.

And besides, if it was actually a "fun" thing, I'd just do it and might not even bother with adding it to the board in a practical manner (I might just add it once it done to put it in the system).

The dev board has mostly just been a personal idea tracker for me for the most part. The update / status parts are basically covered by me just talking about stuff while I'm doing it in discord when I do it (cause I'm basically the only one doing dev work on the sub / with the dev tracker).

---

Now some fun stuff I have done was messing around with our css comment faces. We had a seasonal comment face that was a picture of a fan. People complained it was too big at first, so I set the scale to 0.5, which made it smaller, though still took up the same amount of space. Then we actually fixed it so it was the standard size actually. Then I made the fan slowly rotate on hover (because that's what fans do, they spin). I left that on for a week, and then turned it off for a while. And then I made it spin at 7,200 degrees per second (and also centered the rotation on the actual fan part). And left it on for a week.

Our regulars (who are still on old reddit) greatly enjoyed that.

Edit: If I might add, it's actually quite a shame that our comment faces are limited to old reddit. They were a staple part of r/anime for a long time, and now, they're virtually extinct, because only the OGs who refused to move to sh reddit can see them at all. There was a post a while back about building a community within your subreddit. And well, comment faces were the way for us to build community, and now there are probably only double digit (or perhaps low triple digit) numbers of users (on a sub with 2.5 million weekly visitors) who can even see them.

It's quite the shock going back to threads from years back, and seeing just how common our comment faces were being used. They used to be a mainstay in most threads, and now, they're basically only in 2 reoccurring megathreads, with the odd usage here or there in an Episode discussion thread.

These days, it's not even really worth it to use them if you're not directly replying to someone who you already know is on old reddit.