‘Weddit’ moderators take on crisis communication

Cathy Buckmaster

The (ghost) stories about wedding planning are as eclectic as they are harrowing — and anyone who has been married or is close to someone who has, knows of the suffering that awaits those embarking on nuptials.

Taking into account the enormous amount of organisation, crippling budgets, politics around family dramas and plus ones, as well as the hundreds of decisions required, it’s no shock that many brides and grooms-to-be defer to Reddit and the Redditors for guidance. Unsurprisingly, they’re known as ‘Wedditors’.

Reddit.com, aka the front page of the internet, is a network of communities based on people's interests. Conversation takes place in threads, known as subreddits, which vary widely. You’ll find expected threads like r/worldnews, r/movies, and r/funny as well as more left field subreddits like r/OldSchoolCool, r/todayilearned and r/NotTheOnion (for real news stories that sound like satire).

A recent Wired.com feature has charted the quick transformation of the subreddit (r/weddingplanning) from perky money-saving tips and Say-Yes-To-The-Dress pictures into a breeding ground for concern, thanks to the Coronavirus lockdowns. Postponements and cancellations, family ailments, refunds and responsibilities and the health and safety of guests are among many hot button issues with which the moderators can barely keep up.

The usual tasks of a subreddit moderator are maintaining the thread by filtering spam, deleting comments that don’t abide by the community rules and updating the style or CSS. Now these intermediaries, who often have full-time jobs and lives outside the online world of Reddit, are finding themselves tied to their computers, moderating non-stop in an attempt to keep subscribers as calm as possible.

One moderator is quoted as saying: “Weddit as a community is going through a lot of emotions, and these emotions have changed over time as the situation has changed” — but it’s clear that the anger the Wedditors are feeling has often been directed at the moderators. 

She goes on to say that “Moderating /r/weddingplanning is important, and something I have given years of my life to. It’s just hard in the midst of a pandemic to log into Reddit and see a million reported posts, angry modmails, and posts by users in crisis mode. We love our community and we want to help, but what does help even look like? What can we do? It seems hopeless.”

Read the full Wired.com article for more {Link to https://www.wired.com/story/reddits-wedding-planners-pivot-to-covid-19-crisis-comms/}