The root of the issue is that being an admin is hard work, with consistent time commitment, and it falls to whoever has enough spare time and just feels like doing it. So there’s no real “standard” like there would be at a job. If you annoy the other admins, you’re probably going to be gone, but other than that, they need you to be there, because finding other volunteers to take over for you is going to be difficult.

Here’s what I don’t understand: The social side of LW administration is clearly off the rails. I’m not even trying to say they’re “bad” or power tripping or whatever. They’re just amateurs jumping into what is at the best of times a difficult and neverending balancing act of good judgements, and it makes sense that they’d get it wrong sometimes. But how is the back-end admin team killing it to such a degree? I cannot imagine that running a service like lemmy.world is easy. So… how did they manage to attract people who can succeed at the objectively hard challenge of keeping the whole thing humming along, pretty successfully, when the quality of people they can attract to the much less objective-qualification-needing side of leading the mod team and the social side of admin is so haphazard?

I never really thought about it before, but it’s an interesting question now that I look at it.