Today (just now!) I “resigned” from being a moderator on the Hugo forums.
I tried to be concise, and also signal to others that it’s okay to quit, especially unpaid work. I really enjoy helping out! And fortunately Discourse makes it very easy, where just by continuing to use the site and interact with others I keep my tier,and can therefore do so much mod work. All the actual boring, non-sexy stuff, like fixing typos or categories.
I’m tired of folks coming to me and complaining they aren’t have a better customer service experience. Da fuck? There is no grand structure to the Hugo project, it is fairly straight forward, all the development and roadmapping happening in GitHub issues and Discourse forums. What I’m getting at is: we don’t have dept. or responsibilities.
I was made a mod because it was easier to make me a mod than read my PMs to the mods explaining how to mod a mod. Wait, one too many mods there. I mo Discourse, it’s one of my things. At the time, there was enough activity to justify letting me do what I wanted to do, with very little risk.
I’m explaining this, “aloud” here, to try to hear my own perspective on this. I get so many fuckers sending me PMs or mentioning me in tattles to the other mods that I just closed this post without explaining, even though the thing I would explain is exceptionally clear, and I don’t have to hold everyone’s hand, I just need to close topics that hit certain criteria, such as “having nothing to do with Hugo”.
I’ve been struggling with this for a while because I want prestige to wield over my ego, and I suppose the struggle is in realizing that what the hell do I want prestige for? I need security. I thought I could secure myself, um, with…, via prestige?
I don’t want power, because ugh it’s such a drag. And I have like, unlimited power in so many places, many which happen to be the spots on the web. With talkgroup the spirit of the lower-case discourse is much more aligned to my head. The Hugo forums straddle the web industry, which I hate. But I don’t get to decide that for the Hugo project.
That left me with: no use for the prestige, no love of the game. So, makes sense to get out.
Ahhhhhhh, one less thing to consider. 