I really ought to not involve myself in this topic. It continues to be way too easy to start rambling about something here... But well:
In a way, being a moderator would have a sort of an inspiring effect on me if I was one, that I was good enough to be bestowed the honor and that I now have to do my "duty" to the site. But cleaning out all of that spam from game comments would be pretty demoralizing to me. Also considering that I would get 100 comments every day about how I'm not doing my job well enough or that I banned the wrong user or that I didn't give them a merit for their wonderfully long comment that really deserves one.
To be fair, you would probably not get a hundred comments every day. Anything between none and ten seems to be standard depending on the time of the year and how in-your-face you are as a moderator. More so, if questions and debates are kept to the forums, rather than pulling stuff into privacy of the profiles.
More so, people are extremely cautious when it comes to going up to a mod and telling them they have done something wrong. I assume this is part respect, part not entirely knowing which mod did what and part trying to be sure their opinion is not just erased and their profile banned. Or to rile people up in one of those 'Mods are stupid!', 'Yeah, mods are stupid!!' kind of things.
As such, you are more likely to encounter long threads where someone is complaining about their "friend" being banned unfairly, or that their comment wasn't instantly merited for its glory or some other crap, where the proper response is probably looking into the case and then blowing them out of the water by being blunt. Or, well, the more polite and responsible solution, which would either be to explain stuff in general terms, or lock the thread and discuss it on the profile, which is not as fun as finding their records and telling them their comment was crap and their friend was too, and that is why bad things happen.
Anyway, what I am getting at is that, well, this is not a huge part of the wear-down a mod goes through. Sure, it is annoying to see, but if you really want to annoy a mod, you need to imply either that mods are not doing their job at all, or that we need more mods, so stuff can finally be done. Because, as hidden it can be, there will be a mod sitting there, after two hours of deleting spam on a game, and having an internal struggle between doing the right thing, or snapping, banning everyone and walk away with a sense of contempt.
I know I tried that. It's a subtle pull, but I till do wonder if it wouldn't have felt a lot better than trying to resign properly.
Anyway. Game comments are one of the worst pulls on sanity, at times it is worse than trying to solve problems between people that obviously does not want to have their problems solved (without punching them with a banshovel, that is). So that would most likely be the thing you would focus most on, and feel most guilty about not doing, if you became a mod.
Well, moderating definitely seems like a sisyphean task =)
It sounds about right. At least when it comes to game comments. Everything else that happens regularly can be handled well enough without feeling that everything is useless.
That would be horrible. You would feel accomplished that you finished cleaning out 1 game, and then you would hit the refresh button and there would be another load of spam waiting for you. Not to mention even if there wasn't there are over 2,500 games out there that would need cleaning out. I guess you would just feel as if you were making no progress.
Pretty much.
Though, some of the more fun I have had while modding has been camping a new game. Not because camping a game is fun in itself, but because someone noticed their comment kept disappearing, and became more and more aggravated at this. It was a very rare occurrence.
But hilarious to no end anyway.
