Most unpaid moderators across the entire Internet do so because they have a higher than average interest in the community and want to help keep it running well. You will find some who want to spin a narrative, and some who just want to see a number go up, and some that want to troll their community, and even a small amount who actually are paid shills - but all of these groups put together is but a tiny fraction of all moderators. They’re just usually the most noticeable and so color your perception the most. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, shitty mod gets the public’s attention.

As a moderator, i find it satisfying to clean my little corner of the internet.

We all see spam an scams when we use social media, and there’s not much that you can do about it, maybe report it to admins if you have a minute. For the most part, you’re powerless.

But on my fenced area of the internet, i actually get to do something about it. If your bot reposts content on r/shittyfoodporn to farm karma, i will pluck it out like a snail from my salad and kill it. Removing bad content is as satisfying as popping a pimple, it gives me the same joy as a retired dad meticulously cleaning his garden.

The less enjoyable part is when i have to interfere with the users themselves. Mildly saucy fanart will get posted to r/zootopia and i have to decide if it’s over or under the line, and it feels bad to remove a post that somebody legitimately just wanted to share.

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I haven’t been a mod, but I volunteered for Transcribers of Reddit. For me, it was about having something to do that’s not entirely a waste of time. So I’d call that egoistic altruism.

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I moderated on Reddit for years. It was a subreddit that’d been an immense help for me at a vulnerable point in my life and I wanted to give back and ensure it remained a safe space. From there I branched out into communities dedicated to other things I cared about. I think it’s often altruistic, an act of love for something. But also it’s often self destructive and addictive. You feel you’re needed. And you are, it’s a thankless job that depending on the community can get you regularly threatened and told to kill yourself. But also you need to have a life and not make it into an escape or a cause to martyr yourself

I do it in our (largish) discord server because, quite frankly, the trash won’t take itself out, and I like the community we have cultivated. Everyone wants a well moderated community, where people use the right channels for what theyre named, and don’t come into other channels and start spamming Nwords and other slurs. Everyone wants an unbiased moderation staff that follows a set of their own rules so people don’t get banned unfairly. And in my eyes that’s what we do. (I wont speak for other places on discord, just us) I like to be part of the group keeping chat clean for others to find people to play with. I enjoy talking to users and the conversations happening, so why not give a little time back to keep it that way?

As long as some company doesn’t benefit financially, even a little bit, from me doing free work then I don’t really mind. I just wanted to see a community on a subject I am interested in grow. If it gets too big or too much work I will need to find new moderators and may step down altogether. It doesn’t seem like that will happen any time soon.

So basically I am already here browsing and it isn’t really that much of an inconvenience to click a few extra buttons on occasion to keep a community clean.

I think there are a lot of reasons.

Some people perhaps find they enjoy being able to control large communities - there are definitely some “power mod” users forming here on Lemmy and I don’t know that it is clear why or what that will look like going forward.

I don’t think being a mod is always about having bad motives. I look after a community for a table top role playing game across Discord, Reddit, and here - the community isn’t huge but isn’t insignificant (expect here where there is no activity at all, the main hub is Discord). I recruited a team of mods to help with that, particularly Discord. Not to speak for them, but it’s people who enjoy being around the community and being a part of it. Nothing selfish or power-hungry about it - it is simply for the love of supporting a community you come to love and helping to make sure it continues to be a space the people using it want to be a part of. I set up the community because I enjoy the game, there wasn’t one already, and I didn’t want to clutter up other spaces talking about it. People joined and more importantly stayed because they enjoy the people and the space.

I think a test is when there are issues, or when you decide it is time to move on - are you happy to pass the community on to others who would like to look after it, or do you not do that and lock it down or get rid of it entirely. That feels incredibly selfish, and speaks to your reasons I think; whereas if you are happy to pass the torch because you care about the community which has formed in the space more than whatever you get out of doing the job, it is probably more likely you are doing the job altruistically and because you care.

I’m sure the above isn’t always the case and there are so many reasons and scenarios, just my thoughts at the moment :)

I’m seeing spam start to show up here and looking for ways to help stop that.

Power fantasies, of course.

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Each person has one’s own reasons, I guess. And they might change and evolve over time. That’s what happened with me.

Moderating a forum years and years ago, it was about contributing and “making my part”, as if I had a moral duty to pay back to the community that I enjoyed. Then in Reddit it was about helping a small community to stay alive, when most mods were MIA and the only one who wasn’t was [likely] overburdened; I feared that the community would end “banned as unmoderated” and/or taken over by a specific powermod. Then now in Lemmy it’s about creating spaces to discuss things that I enjoy.

In none of those cases I’d say that I was/am being altruistic - I’m motivated by my own wants. But if other people benefit from it, so be it.

For some perhaps there’s also the feeling of power (all hail the almighty janny). Others might get off-record monetary incentives to do it. Others might be genuinely altruistic, unlike me. Who knows.

I just created a community here on the Fediverse/Lemmy that I enjoyed on Reddit . So now I’m a mod of it, nothing altruistic or ulterior about it, probably more egotistical.

Most of lemmy’s community mods thus far are just passionate pioneers who want to refound their favorite subreddits here and then invite people over and demote interested people to mod to make more entirely-new moderators, if the migrated subs are big ones, then odds are the actual mods for the originals are the powertripping, far-left and probable-chomo type who don’t wanna give up the powertrip they enjoy on reddit for a small refuge that nobody posts on in comparison.