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David Peck Paresh
Alyssa Videlock was 11 years old when she started looking for other people like her on the internet. What he discovered in the early 2000s was not at all what he expected. “Being trans online doesn’t exist,” she said. There were fetish things to that, and there were stories of transformation. But it was porn or. . . porn.
So Videlock was especially grateful, about a decade later, when she started exploring Reddit. She was cooped up with her circle of family and friends, and finding a place where she could communicate with other trans people kept her sane, she says. On Reddit, trans people had strength in numbers and strength in the face of developing trolls. Through an elaborate formula of volunteer moderators, Reddit allows its communities, called subreddits or subs, to tame their own rules, cultures, and protections. Submarines frequented through Videlock, such as r/asktransgender and r/MtF, were very effective in fighting harassment. “I felt like I could make a call for myself there,” she says.
For Videlock, hiding on Reddit has become a prelude to posting from time to time, which has eventually become a prelude to making a call in the real world, and in 2017, he began to make the transition. A few years later, she saw a video of a trans woman playing the piano on Reddit’s live-streaming service, r/pan, and was moved to see moderators take down one vicious comment after another. The screen encouraged her to become a moderator.
The 33-year-old software developer, who lives in New York City, volunteered about five hours a day, seven days a week, exorcising spam, breaking up fights, and removing hate-filled insults on a handful of subreddits, adding r/lgbt, one of Reddit’s top subreddits. It has joined the ranks of more than 60,000 mods running subreddits ranging from artistic (r/nosleep, a network of other people who write first-person horror fiction) and supportive (r/REDDITORSINRECOVERY) to crude (r/ratemypoo) and the disgusting and unpredictable (r/FiftyFifty, a 2. 2 million-member network for sharing blind links, some of which lead to anything disturbing).
For better or worse, Reddit has long been an island of authenticity in an increasingly synthetic world: a place where genuine people, hidden in the intimacy of fake names, share their furious enthusiasm, experience, and morbid thoughts; where memes and viral movements sprout from a primordial soup of upvotes and chatter; where a million users each give $1 to a stranger just to become a millionaire for fun; and where other people with alcohol problems, parental crises, overwhelming debt, or gender confusion can combine and compare their wrestling scores. (Reddit, by one expert in the adult industry’s estimation, also offers more than PornHub, a claim disputed by Reddit. )
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After years as a low-key user, Videlock has gained a whole new appreciation for Reddit as a volunteer. I had also moderated on Discord, but there was no comparison: Reddit mods shared gear and tricks that allowed them to be much more preventative and strategic. Sometimes, for example, trolls post vicious comments and then temporarily delete their account or the comment itself, a surveillance tactic that helps them evade detection and punishment. As a Reddit mod, Videlock had a third-party app that allowed it to retroactively search for deleted comments.
Every time Reddit asked mods for feedback, Alyssa Videlock stepped forward.
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