Columbia has an active subreddit, r/columbiamo, where community members share news, historical facts and quirky tidbits about life in a college town. It’s regulated by moderators — or mods — who make sure it remains a safe space for conversation.
Matt Fetterly, known on Reddit as Como365, is one of those mods. He spoke with KBIA’s Nora Crutcher-McGowan about the ins and outs of Reddit and how the platform offers a sense of community in Columbia.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nora Crutcher-McGowan: What are the rules?
Matt Fetterly: As a mod, you're bound basically to create a consistent standard for the community, a set of rules that everybody's bound to follow, and most importantly — enforce them fairly. We have four mods now on r/columbiamo. So it's a team effort. One person can't do it all. And it's basically, literally to moderate the dialogue. Often, because Reddit is a very political forum, or can be, especially the state subreddits, you get pretty vitriolic comments from both extreme sides of the political spectrum, down to threats of violence against each other and against public figures. And so a moderator's job is to not allow that and to filter that out so that real community conversation can happen, people can feel safe that there's no extreme hate speech.
Crutcher-McGowan: I think there's also something to be said for the fact that people are regulating the content and not someone working at these big tech companies.
Fetterly: And there are those people too, and they're above us. There are Reddit administrators who have the final call on everything. And if we make a decision, someone can appeal that to someone who works at the big tech company. But I have to say, Reddit has taken a very liberal hand in allowing a wide latitude for moderators to run their subreddits as they see fit.
"In a way, it is serving a function that used to be served 100 years ago by sort of clubs and societies and fraternal organizations."Matt Fetterly
Crutcher-McGowan: People are, you know, getting together in real life because of Reddit, like with the, you know, toaster steak event. That all started on Reddit. People came together, no one knew each other really.
Fetterly: Those are my very favorite things. I think there's a queer book club that has started off of r/columbiamo. Still one of our top posts of all time, somebody posted their wedding photos because they said they met their wife on r/columbiamo. And they posted — or maybe it was their husband, I don't remember — but they posted those and we all congratulated them. And then famously in this last year, maybe infamously, the steak toaster event in Stephens Lake Park.
Reddit has a whimsy to it that I think is much needed right now. In a way, it is a silo. But in a way, it is serving a function that used to be served 100 years ago by sort of clubs and societies and fraternal organizations. These things mixed people of wide backgrounds and most importantly, different economic class. So you could have a banker who was a Freemason, but you might also have a bricklayer who was a Freemason, and they were in the club together 100 years ago.
Now, maybe some of that's still going on in society, but the Reddit platform, almost everybody, not everybody, but almost everybody has some sort of internet connection. Right now, we're averaging about 7,000 or 8,000 uniques a day. And the population of Columbia is 130,000. So there's a good chunk of people that find out their information, find out what's going on in their community through Reddit.
