How do you manage burnout and turnover among moderators?

Moderator burnout is one of the most persistent and underaddressed problems in Reddit community management. Volunteer moderators receive no compensation, deal with significant amounts of negative and sometimes distressing content, and operate in a largely thankless role where their contributions are invisible when things go well and highly visible when things go wrong. Without deliberate structural support, burnout is not an exception but an inevitability. The primary structural prevention for burnout is appropriate team sizing. A subreddit with tens of thousands of active members needs a mod team large enough that no individual moderator is responsible for monitoring the community around the clock. Distributing the modqueue workload across multiple people across different time zones creates natural coverage without requiring any single person to maintain an exhausting schedule. The guideline that should trigger a recruitment push is not "we can barely manage" but "one of our mods could take a two-week break without the community suffering." Defining role boundaries helps prevent the scope creep that creates burnout. When moderators know specifically which tasks are their responsibility and which belong to others, they are less likely to feel that the entire community's quality depends on their personal effort. Rotating responsibilities over time — who reviews the modqueue, who handles modmail, who maintains the wiki — prevents any one moderator from becoming a single point of failure and gives everyone variety that reduces the psychological monotony of doing the same tasks indefinitely. Cultivating genuine camaraderie within the mod team is underrated as a burnout prevention strategy. Teams that communicate with each other beyond purely logistical matters, celebrate wins together, and genuinely look out for each other's wellbeing are more resilient than those operating as isolated individuals who share a modqueue. Explicitly acknowledging when a team member has done particularly good work, and normalizing conversations about stress and workload, creates a team culture that sustains itself rather than grinding down its members.