Community Mgers and Mods

It doesn't make sense to me that community managers are becoming a hot role to hire for while being called a Discord / Twitch mod is the Internet's playground insult.

To put it into perspective, Discord and Twitch mods were community managers long before the role had a name for its job. Between 4 – 8 hour periods as Twitch streamers

In conclusion, ______. Besides, if the Internet really needs a set of people to become comparable playground insults, it's reply guys — those guys really have problems.

To start off in regards to my history with Design Buddies, I joined the community almost a year ago in May 2020 - when it was merely at around 1,000 members. I had Grace Ling, the founder of Design Buddies, on LinkedIn since late 2018-early 2019 actually! We reconnected on the professional social media platform, and I messaged her if she was looking for someone to design a potential website for Design Buddies. At the time, I had completed a marketing internship that ended up not being fulfilling and wanted to go back to my roots in design - but in UX/UI, to be exact. I ended up becoming one of the founding Admins of the 20,000 member (and growing!) community that many of you are familiar with today. I became an Admin as I was now looking to break into the UX field, after having previously come from a marketing & communications background. But when it comes to UX, it appears to be a super highly saturated career path just to get into - and one that requires a lot of hustle and drive, when you’re just starting off learning the basics of it all. Therefore, I realized I needed to do as many things as I can to get familiar with UX, which included immersing myself in the greater design community. That was what led to me contacting Grace to be an Admin for Design Buddies.

I am one of the Community Lead Admins for Design Buddies. Basically, my responsibilities are to watch the server and maintain our positive, welcoming, and inclusive environment at all times. I make sure that users post on the appropriate channel(s), and if they’re unsure as to which channel to post on (we have over 50+ channels!), or if a post is suitable for Design Buddies, we welcome them to submit their inquiries to a bot called ModMail, which acts as a centralized hub for the Admin team to view and respond to user messages in a fast, efficient, and convenient manner. If we get trolls, we act fast and boot them out. These are what my responsibilities entail, and I do just that, first thing each day - open Discord, check all the unread channels from overnight, and respond to users and any inquiries they might have. If the Admin team has posted any updates on our “Admin-only” channel, I also check that too. Since we have members from all over the world, in many different timezones, I watch Design Buddies all 7 days a week. The admins do not have shifts - we go on the server whenever we are available and have downtime. For me, the time that I spend on Discord varies though, depending on how busy I am with other life commitments. Since I started my full-time job back in December, I’m mostly on the server after work hours during the evenings now. During the weekends, I check Discord sporadically. None of the admins, including myself, do not get monetarily compensated. We admin and give back to the design community because we all share a common vision, which is to connect and support designers of all backgrounds and skillsets!