With somewhere in the neighborhood of half-a-billion monthly users, Reddit is among the most widely used and idiosyncratic sites on the internet. The self-described “front page of the internet,” founded in 2005, is user-driven and has attracted a wide array of diverse users, even if something of a stereotype has developed around the site — youngish, largely male, internet obsessive, anonymous, skeptical to a fault.
Reddit’s posts are organized into more than a million forums known as “subreddits,” so despite the stereotype, the fact is Reddit offers a wide variety of voices and topics. We recently messaged two of the moderators of the Nashville subreddit, a community with north of 38,000 subscribers. (Note: Moderators are not the same as admins, a distinction that was made clear to us in our correspondence.) Naturally, when I first reached out, I was asked to authenticate my identity. After complying by sending a selfie taken while holding the most recent issue of the Scene, I was able to send my questions along to r/Nashville mods pencer and onewaybackpacking. Pencer is a native Tennessean who has lived downtown for two decades and works for a local wholesale operation. Onewaybackpacking works in health care consulting, has been here about five years and travels frequently. Some of the mods’ answers have been truncated for the sake of brevity.
How’d you come on as an r/Nashville admin?
Onewaybackpacking: My involvement started about five years ago when I moved to Nashville, but was honestly borne well before that as I was traveling the world and using reddit to research countries, find other travelers, and just generally be a backpacking bum. When I moved to Nashville, the wiki on the sub was absolutely terrible and didn’t include much of anything useful to actually do or see — which surprised me for a city of Nashville’s size. I basically took it upon myself to start writing a “what to do” guide of Nashville and reached out to the mods at that time to see if they could give me permission to update the wiki. They asked me for a few paragraphs of new material — I dumped a short novel on them — and within no time they had given me full mod permissions. Years later as my life has changed, the wiki is set up so that anybody with a reasonable amount of time and karma on the sub can edit the wiki, and I no longer need to keep up with the opening and closing of restaurants around town.
Pencer: I was added almost five years ago as a moderator after I attended one of the annual worldwide “Reddit meetup” days, wherein the site helps to try to coordinate for the local subreddits to encourage users to go and meet each other. One of the other moderators was aware of my mod status in other subreddits with large subscriber counts. Knowing that I had experience with the mod tools and community management, they decided that I could be of use to this mod team. Sidenote: Admins are the individuals and users who operate the site (they get paid). Moderators are volunteer user accounts that are there to oversee each individual community/subreddit. Moderators are not and (according to site rules) should not be compensated for their time or actions without the possibility of their account and/or IP being banned.
Would you say the tone of r/Nashville is more cordial/friendly than the average subreddit? About the same?
Onewaybackpacking: Equal parts Southern cordial and aggressive asshole. Depending on the time of year (bachelorette-high-season) or what you’re asking (“Anyone know of an abandoned building?”), the people on the subreddit can either be extremely helpful when presented with a question, or immediately jump down someone’s throat and make them feel bad about not Googling something themselves. In a nutshell — what I’ve seen is that if you have a genuine question about life in Nashville that isn’t asked five-plus times a week — you’ll get an honest and thoughtful answer from a few people.
Pencer: From my perspective the sub’s tone is about average, but a smidge more on the cordial/friendly side. Of course there are hot-button issues that will bring out some nastiness and unnecessary name-calling between users regular and new, but I’ve tried to set up a multitude of filters to prevent obvious slurs and bigotry so they don’t end up in the public view or cause a continuation of futile internet keyboard battles.
Can you recall any specific incidents in which the community rallied around some specific cause, or teamed up to help a poster in a particular way?
Onewaybackpacking: Every once in a while someone posits a question about food that the entire community has something to say about. An example is a thread ranking Nashville’s top five best burgers. Hasn’t happened too recently though. The other topic more recently that everyone has decided to get behind is hatred for the scooters popping up all over town. Not sure if I have to even explain that one.
How much time and effort would you say you put into your duties on the average week?
Onewaybackpacking: I think the amount of time I’ve spent doing “mod” stuff has varied over time (when I was rewriting the wiki to now), but nowadays it’s closer to maybe two to three hours a week, although it is really hard to quantify. I check up on the sub throughout the day, read almost all the posts, read the queue for things that are flagged as potentially bad as I have time — but pencer is the one dealing with probably 80 percent-plus of the day-to-day nonsense on the site.
Pencer: I might browse the site a total of two to three hours a day, in between smoke or bathroom breaks, or just casual boredom. Mod actions might take up a third of that time throughout the day. So if I spend around 21 hours a week browsing … SMH … maybe five to seven hours a week performing mod tasks.
