Ren Vasquez
Tutor for the enforcement weeks. Moderated a 2.1-million-subscriber subreddit for six years, then handed over the keys and wrote down why.
- Role
- Tutor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- r.vasquez@slop.university
- Contact
- In the Shift, or by modmail to the course subreddit. Not by DM.
Six years on the mod team of a default-adjacent subreddit with 2.1 million subscribers, four of them as the person who wrote the AutoModerator config. At peak we were removing about 900 comments a day between nine volunteers, none of whom had met, on a rota that existed because I made a spreadsheet.
I left in June 2023 during the API protest, along with most of the team. What I actually think about that month is complicated and I will tell you the complicated version in week 10, not the version that got upvoted.
The thing I am here to teach is narrower than politics: a removal is a message to a person. Most moderators never learn to write one, because the interface does not ask them to. In the enforcement weeks you will write several hundred, and I will mark them the way I marked applicants to my own team.