I became a mod for one of the larger subreddit communities (10M+ subscribers) for similar reasons: I enjoyed the community and wanted to help out. Same platfor

I became a mod for one of the larger subreddit communities (10M+ subscribers) for similar reasons: I enjoyed the community and wanted to help out. Same platform, but the experience couldn't be more different: we spend almost all our time dealing with "shallow" problems at a high scale. For us that means flamewars, brigading and (usually political) astroturfing, and to a lesser extent commercial spam. We don't even remotely have time to go looking for deeper problems such as ban evasion, because the volume is so high. We know it's probably happening but it's almost impossible to police because it disappears against the everyday noise. One thing that I think helps us a lot is heavy use of automoderator rules and the spam filter to remove the most obvious problems automatically. I think smaller and more local communities breed a very different class of problems than big ones -- it's much more personal for the participants, and their retaliation is more personal as well. Also, a single abusive user can do so much more damage in a small community because they don't just blend into the background noise. One constant though is that we do see some really troubling things as well.