I Held On for About a Year Too Long

I stayed as head moderator for about a year longer than I should have. The community did not suffer greatly and I did, and the interesting part is that all the signals were present and I read every one of them as a reason to stay.

The first signal was that decisions were waiting for me. A question would sit for two days until I answered it, not because the other moderators were unable, but because a habit had formed that certain things were mine. I read this as being needed. It was a bottleneck I had created by answering everything for four years, and every time I answered another one I reinforced it.

The second was that I had stopped enjoying the ordinary part. Early on, reading the forum was the reward and the moderation was the cost. By year five I was reading it exclusively as a queue. Every thread looked like potential work. I noticed this and interpreted it as burnout to be managed rather than as information about fit.

The third, and the clearest in retrospect, was that my knowledge had gone stale. I was making calls about a community whose active core I no longer recognised, using precedents from a period most members had not been present for. Twice I made a decision that was correct by the standards of 2021 and landed badly, and both times I concluded that the community had drifted rather than that I had.

What made leaving hard was not ego, or not only ego. It was that I could not see how it would work without me, which was accurate as a description of the arrangement I had built and not accurate as a description of what was possible. I had spent years making myself necessary through ordinary diligence — answering fast, taking the difficult ones, being available — and the result was a structure with one point of failure and a person who felt responsible for it.

The handover took four months and was mostly a matter of not doing things. Not answering the questions that would sit for two days. Letting decisions be made differently than I would have made them, including two I thought were wrong and which turned out fine. The hardest part was a period of about six weeks where things were visibly worse, and where every instinct said to step back in, and where stepping back in would have reset the whole process.

It has been two years. The place is different from what I would have made and it is healthy. About a third of what I thought was essential turned out not to be, which was humbling and also a relief, and the successor has changed several things I had defended for years, and been right about most of them.

The thing I would say to anyone in the same position: the feeling that it needs you is generated by the arrangement, not by the facts, and there is no way to test it except by withdrawing and tolerating the gap. If you cannot tolerate the gap, that is worth knowing about yourself and it is a separate problem from whether the community needs you.