[nebulous_two]

Put yourself in the shoes of your average content moderator. Aren't they there for the paycheck like most people at their jobs? Why does everyone assume these people are first and foremost bastions of acceptable behaviour? They are instructed by executives as to how to do their jobs. Now executives are learning nuance and say "oh there's more to this than you thought, so here's the updated guidelines to follow now", to shift blame for this broken system to the moderators when all along they were following orders from above.

[dekhn]

No, those folks are not there just to get a paycheck. They are evangelists for a viewpoint who use their moderation powers to eliminate thoughts they don't like.

And yes, those teams really did come up with their determinations of what was OK and what wasn't, based on their own beliefs. That made that quite clear in their repeated, stupid posts on memegen.

[qmarchi]

1st rule about memegen, is don't talk about memegen >.>

[piaste]

Man, memegen was covered by Buzzfeed ten years ago.

It ain't exactly the hottest, edgiest shitposting club out there.

[dotnet00]

I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are in that position because they specifically want the power that comes with it. We see this all the time with volunteer moderators getting high on their power, pushing through whatever agenda they have regardless of user opinion.

I think those types of people are even more likely to end up as paid content moderators, since the work tends to be too tedious for most average people to deal with.

[newjersey]

» I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are in that position because they specifically want the power that comes with it.

I love that you were courageous enough to say this because this is completely true and also why we say #ACAB. Most people who want to be police officers are absolutely unfit to be police officers!

[dotnet00]

I hadn't actually thought about applying that reasoning to the police and while there is a higher bar to becoming a police officer, I do have to agree with the overall idea.

There probably isn't any job which is an exception to this, politicians are similarly mainly people who want the associated influence and even engineers become engineers so they have control over engineering. It's just that the incentives are more perverse with politicians, police and moderators than with engineers.

[bombcar]

Once the pool for some jobs gets large enough, the self selection of those who apply for it can become a problem.

From what I understand from rumors in the area, is those who couldn't become police (for whatever reason) would then go apply at the prison, and those who couldn't get a job there (and it appears they take anyone with a pulse) would go work for TSA.

Perhaps the "public servant" idea should be taken to a larger extreme, and some positions picked by lottery instead.

[macksd]

Are other cases of online abuse, workplace harassment, discrimination, etc. so rare that people are actually chasing problems like this for a paycheck? It would be wonderful if that was the case, but I doubt that it is.

[skrbjc]

Many people willingly do things like this voluntarily at their jobs to the point that the job they were hired for seems like a second priority for them.