[nappy-doo]

I worked at FB for almost 2 years. (I left as soon as I could, I knew it wasn't a good fit for me.)

I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twenty-something girl, was asking how to become a moderator. I told her, "no amount of money would be enough for me to do that job. Don't do it."

I don't know if she eventually got the job, but I hope she didn't.

[narrator]

Yes, these jobs are horrible. However, I do know from accidently encountering bad stuff on the internet that you want to be as far away from a modern battlefield as possible.

It's just kind of ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. One minute you're sitting in a trench, the next you're a pile of undifferentiated blood and guts. Same goes for car accidents and stuff. People really underestimate how fragile we are as human beings. Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life.

[noduerme]

Watching someone you love die of cancer is also super damaging to one's concept of normal life. Getting a diagnosis, or being in a bad car accident, or the victim of a violent assault is, too. I think a personal sense of normality is nothing more than the state of mind where we can blissfully (and temporarily) forget about our own mortality. Obviously, marinating yourself in all the horrible stuff makes it really hard to maintain that state of mind.

On the other hand, never seeing or reckoning with or preparing for how brutal reality actually is can lead to a pretty bad shock once something bad happens around you. And maybe worse, can lead you to under-appreciate how fantastic and beautiful the quotidian moments of your normal life actually are. I think it's important to develop a concept of normal life that doesn't completely ignore that really bad things happen all around us, all the time.

[FireBeyond]

Speaking as a paramedic, two things come to mind:

1) I don't have squeamishness about trauma. In the end, we are all blood and tissue. The calls that get to me are the emotionally traumatic, the child abuse, domestic violence, elder abuse (which of course often have a physical component too, but it's the emotional for me), the tragic, often preventable accidents.

2) There are many people, and I get the curiosity, that will ask "what's the worst call you've been on?" - one, you don't really want to hear, and two, "Hey, person I may barely know, do you think you can revisit something traumatic for my benefit/curiosity?"

[andrepd]

I'm pretty sure watching videos on /r/watchpeopledie or rekt threads on 4chan has been a net positive for me. I'm keenly aware of how dangerous cars are, that wars (including narcowars) are hell, that I should never stay close to a bus or truck as a pedestrian or bycicle, that I should never get into a bar fight... And that I'm very very lucky that I was not born in the 3rd world.

[doublerabbit]

One does not fully-experience life until you encounter a death of something you care about. It being a pet, person; nothing gives you that real sense of reality until your true feelings are challenged.

I used to live in the Disney headspace until my dog had to be put down. Now with my parents being in their seventies, and me in my thirties I fear losing them the most as the feeling of losing my dog was hard enough.

[int_19h]

It's not that we're particularly fragile, given the kind of physical trauma human beings can survive and recover from.

It's that we have technologically engineered things that are destructive enough to get even past that threshold. Modern warfare in particular is insanely energetic in the most literal, physical way - when you measure the energy output of weapons in joules. Partly because we're just that good at making things explode, and partly because improvements in metallurgy and electronics made it possible over time to locate targets with extreme precision in real time and then concentrate a lot of firepower directly on them. This, in particular, is why the most intense battlefields in Ukraine often look worse than WW1 and WW2 battles of similar intensity (e.g. Mariupol had more buildings destroyed than Stalingrad).

But even our small arms deliver much more energy to the target than their historical equivalents. Bows and arrows pack ~150 J at close range, rapidly diminishing with distance. Crossbows can increase this to ~400 J. For comparison, an AK-47 firing standard issue military ammo is ~2000 J.

[HPsquared]

I'm no longer interested in getting a motorcycle, for similar reasons.

[nradov]

I don't mean to trivialize traumatic experiences but I think many modern people, especially the pampered members of the professional-managerial class, have become too disconnected from reality. Anyone who has hunted or butchered animals is well aware of the fragility of life. This doesn't damage our concept of normal life.

[h_tbob]

I concluded that we really should have the speed limit at 45mph on highways. Then one body dying on the road would be so rare it would be newsworthy.

[Shorel]

> Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life.

Not being aware of this is also a cause of traffic accidents. People should be more careful driving.

[sandworm101]

>> ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty.

It is also ridiculous how people think every soldier's experience is like Band of Brothers or Full Metal Jacket. I remember an interview with a WWII vet who had been on omaha beach: "I don't remember anything happening in slow motion ... I do remember eating a lot of sand." The reality of war is often just not visually interesting enough to put on the screen.

[portaouflop]

Normal does not exist - it’s just the setting on your washing machine.

[LeftHandPath]

Earlier this year, I was at ground zero of the Super Bowl parade shooting. I didn’t ever dream about it, but I spent the following 3-4 days constantly replaying it in my head in my waking hours.

Later in the year I moved to Florida, just in time for Helene and Milton. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either of them (aside from during prep and cleanup and volunteering a few weeks after). But I had frequent dreams of catastrophic storms and floods.

Different stressors affect people (even myself) differently. Thankfully I’ve never had a major/long-term problem, but I know my reactions to major life stressors never seemed to have any rhyme or reason.

I can imagine many people might’ve been through a few things that made them confident they’d be alright with the job, only to find out dealing with that stuff 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is a whole different ball game.

[sandworm101]

A parade shooting is bad, very bad, but is still tame compared to the sorts of things to which website moderators are exposed on a daily/hourly basis. Footage of people being shot is actually allowed on many platforms. Just think of all the war footage that is so common these days. The dark stuff that moderators see is way way worse.

[consumer451]

I have often wondered what would happen if social product orgs required all dev and product team members to temporarily rotate through moderation a couple times a year.

[alex-korr]

I can tell you that back when I worked as a dev for the department building order fulfillment software at a dotcom, my perspective on my own product has drastically changed after I had spent a month at a warehouse that was shipping orders coming out of the software we wrote. Eating my own dog food was not pretty.

[Teever]

Yeah I've wondered the same thing about jobs in general too.

Society would be a very different place if everyone had to do customer service or janitorial work one weekend a month.