Content moderators are just janitors of social media: Low-pay, low-respect, but one of the most important jobs of cleaning up human trash

Pretty much. "better than nothing but will often miss corners and edge cases, and get tripped up by the sock someone left on the floor.'

Mods have always been treated shitty as far back as ye olden BBS and FidoNet days. Always.

Lots of people say the mods are useless but they are honestly the main reason Reddit spaces were useful at all. It's easy to not have a mod team when there's only a few hundred people in a board, but "be nice" doesn't work with a million users.