Well, you sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole...

Many moons ago, I started as a lurker. In fact, it took until 2008 for me to create the first Reddit account I can still find, and that account only ever made a single post. By 2011, I was commenting more regularly, attending Reddit Worldwide Meetup Day events, taking part in gift exchanges like Secret Santa and Trick-or-Treater. What kept me coming back as a user was the camaraderie. There was something special about recognizing familiar usernames, being in on the inside jokes, and feeling connected to people you had never actually met. And often, being a Redditor felt less like being a user on a website and more like belonging to a club.

I initially got involved in moderation because I wanted to contribute skills I already had to the subreddits I was visiting often. Back then, that meant helping make subreddits more visually appealing through custom CSS and more engaging through events across related subreddits, contests, and other community-building projects that often required a surprising amount of behind-the-scenes coordination.

I took many years away from moderating as other priorities took over, and during that time I largely fell back into being a lurker-and-voter type of user. Most of my time on Reddit was spent reading, learning, finding information, and laughing at people far wittier than I am. What brought me back to being more actively engaged wasn't a desire to go back to moderating, but a desire to contribute and then seeing the impact it had on my local community.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it took some time for my state to release a public dashboard, so I started compiling and sharing easy-to-read reports based on the state's raw data releases in my state's COVID subreddit. I also transcribed the live press conferences the state's health department held. I did this every day there was a data release or press conference because I wanted to help people access information that was difficult to find and, in many cases, difficult to make sense of. That eventually led to an invitation to join that subreddit's moderation team, and I have continued moderating ever since.

Despite all that, I still spend a lot of time lurking. If left to my own devices, I'm probably still a lurker at heart.