“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.

At /r/aww, people don’t always submit pictures of kittens and puppies. Sometimes they post gore porn, or threats to find me and hurt me. My rules are both obvious (kittens are great; no gore porn, no threats) and designed to prevent misuse of the platform (no social media links or handles, and no spamming). At /r/pokemon, I block pictures of, say, caterpillars, because those aren’t Pokémon, are they? No, no, they aren’t.

/r/aww is the 10th largest subreddit. Every one of the 19 million people there is pseudonymous, and many abuse their relative anonymity. But there are also of course the good users, our singing birds. Like /u/Shitty_watercolour, a user who paints scenes that come up in the comments and then posts them. Or /u/Poem_ for_your_sprog, the user who appears without warning and replies to posts exclusively in verse.

Once, on /r/AskReddit, someone invited health inspectors to describe the worst violations they’d ever seen. A user named /u/Chamale responded with a story. “My stepdad used to be a baker,” Chamale began. The stepdad’s bakery was an authentic re-creation of an 18thcentury French fortress, and one day a health inspector came by; she was initially wary of the stonework walls and the doorless entryways, but the stepfather was able to convince her that these 18thcentury touches took nothing away from his commitment to the highest health standards. Then, as the inspector was ending her visit, she walked into a doorless building attached to the bakery. There stood an escaped cow licking all of the bread loaves.

Soon, this reply came from /u/Poem_ for_your_sprog:

my name is Cow,

and wen its nite,

or wen the moon

is shiyning brite,

and all the men

haf gon to bed -

I stay up late. I lik the bred.

Reddit has been called a lot of things: a “vast underbelly,” a “cesspool,” “proudly untamed.” And it is complicated. But it’s the good parts that I’m here to protect.

Sometimes that means fighting zombies. Across Reddit, unused accounts pile up, the ghostly remains of a million people who have just tried out the site for a day and then given it up. What you have to look out for is when these older accounts, long since dead and forgotten, suddenly come to life—because they can be dangerous.

One night I came across a post submitted by a user named /u/Magnolia- Quezada. The title of the post was “I miss you so much,” and it consisted of a picture of two dogs, a husky and a yellow Lab, hugging over a fence. At first glance, the author seemed like a normal redditor. The account had been created 11 months earlier, a modestly respectable duration. Every account has a badge that shows its age, and older accounts are rarer and better established. Someone who’s been around is seen as one of us. Because /u/ MagnoliaQuezada was many months old, it was able to bypass our subreddit’s homegrown spam filters, living and digital. But on closer inspection, it hadn’t posted a single thing. And now, having seemingly come back to life, it had shown up in my queue.

I could see that /u/MagnoliaQuezada’s user history was blank. And I could see that the hugging-dogs image was kind of blurry. That’s because it had been uploaded and shared and redownloaded so many times. Image quality goes down when photographs are compressed and recompressed by websites as they circulate online. The image had been stolen.

I checked the comments on the post. There was just one, from none other than /u/MagnoliaQuezada: