Life as a comment moderator

Catching up on some articles about online comments ...

Atlantic Monthly ended online comments Feb. 2 in favor of an online letters section. (You can read about that here.) One of the magazine's comment moderators wrote about his experience.
"The relentless grind had a psychological and emotional toll," writes Alan Taylor. He compares moderating comments for several years to "living in a long-term abusive relationship."

Taylor was correct that Atlantic's comments could be bad, but they also could be really good. I was sorry to see them go. I was also struck by how the system Atlantic Monthly had to moderate comments seemed scattershot. Taylor kind of just fell into the job (which is something that seems to be true for everyone in journalism at least once in their careers). He moderated all hours of the day, and burned out on it. Compare his description of his work to moderation teams at the New York Times, for example, which is using human and computer moderation, along with things like respected regular commenters whose work is not moderated. This is how to manage online comments.