“You Couldn't Pay Me To Do That.”

The punishing ecstasy of being a Reddit moderator.

- Robert Peck

These are the rules: Users of /r/aww aren’t allowed to post about dogs that are dying, or sick, or just back from the vet. No posts about cats just adopted off the street; no bird-with-an-injured-beak stories. Cheerful descriptions of animals, however, are very much on point. Accompanying an image of a huge dog in a car’s passenger seat: “This is Ben. He has a beard. And he is human sized. We get fun looks in traffic.” Next to an image of a cat under elaborate blankets: “Our cat is obsessed with blanket forts, so we made him this.”

These standards of adorable positivity are important to me, because I’m one of the moderators of /r/aww, the cute animal subreddit. In case that seems trivial, allow me to remind you of how powerful pet memes are online: As of this writing, the page has 19 million subscribers, and it’s growing fast. Across the other subreddits that I moderate—/r/pokemon, home to a litany of imagined monsters; /r/Party-Parrot, home to dancing birds—I oversee a couple million more subscribers. My job is to make and enforce rules for all of them.

Before these, I watched over other subreddits: /r/food, /r/Poetry, /r/LifePro- Tips, and dozens more. I got my first Reddit mod job, overseeing /r/pokemon, in 2014, when I was a senior in college. The volunteers put out a call for people to join their ranks, and I applied, writing that I wanted to bulk up on meaningful hobbies before I joined the world of full-time work. A week later, I was taken in.

There are less than 500 paid employees at Reddit, but tens of thousands of us volunteer moderators, for 14 billion pageviews a month. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED’s publisher, Condé Nast, is a Reddit shareholder.) My peers and I see every post and comment that comes in, one by one. We check every one against each subreddit’s rules. Our rules.