Just wanted to chime in as another mod mentioned in the article who has been communicating back and forth with Ms. Harding over the last few weeks. I’m also burnt out on the idea of being a mod again. It’s just not worth it, especially when I have so many other things to occupy my time with.

As someone with no interest in canning whatsoever, I just want to thank you and your fellow mod below for contributing your niche expertise and no doubt enormous amounts of time and passion to the internet.

People call modding a thankless task, and at times like this it must surely feel that way, but countless people will have silently thanked you as they benefitted from your expertise and willingness to share it freely. You represent what humanity and science and education should really be about, for that I deeply appreciate your efforts.

Thank you so much for your service. I was a mod of a tiny gaming sub and so got only the barely taste of what you must have experienced daily. In my case we argued endlessly (& unfortunately sometimes toxically) which game mechanics are "better" to take advantage of, ~~while you are over there dealing with literally potential life-and-death situations!~~ (edit: oh, well it at least is true for some mods, even if not you, but I still thank you for all your efforts nonetheless!:-P) (I hoped that during a pandemic I was at least helping people deal emotionally with being indoors all the time, plus just in general trying to encourage good behavior within society, but it is nowhere near the same I am sure:-P) I can only imagine the stress you had to go through here during the fall of Reddit, but I do not have to imagine that feeling of burn-out: most mods actually who really truly care about their communities only last a handful of years if that (I think I read somewhere that the average was like 1-2 years).

You deserve peace, and maybe you'll find some other way to contribute to your community - in fact you definitely will, though it may not be on the internet next time:-). Also, I noticed that a lot of the stressful situations I encountered were due to Reddit changing its nature YEARS before Huffman did this recent fiasco - it encouraged people to speak rather than listen, e.g. to perhaps ask for recipes rather than do a search for pre-existing ones. An additional post = an additional metric to count and potentially an additional advertisement to display, while a search showing "canned" results (hehehe pun intended:-P) did not gather them as much profit, but then the former added to your workload whereas the latter would not, so a great deal of the problems that mods faced were issues of Reddit's own devising, I think. At least in quantity if not in quality.

But also in quality too b/c it changed the very focus away from finding facts and towards encouraging the lonely to speak with others, in a manner in which "facts" can take a backseat to that human connection... which can get some people killed in the process.:-(

So I definitely understand why you would want to distance yourself from all of that. Me too. The need will be met in some other way - maybe via books, magazines, or websites with only vetted authors allowed, or perhaps with disclaimers added to every submission, and maybe a paid curation staff, or even AI tools scanning for common misinformation specific to that genre, I don't know. But in any case, I did want to thank you for your own efforts. I have no interest in any of those communities so never once went to any of those, but I do like to see people volunteering their time to help other human beings:-).

I was the sole mod of /r/skin until I got warned about the subreddit being private in protest.

I originally took it over because it was 100% spam and scams and the previous mod hadn't been on Reddit for years. It took a year before the spammers gave up. When I left I turned off the automod and the spammers will return. So much for trying to build a helpful space.

Thanks for contributing to the article by agreeing to be interviewed for it. How did they track you down, if you don't mind me asking?