(Apologies, in advance, for so long a quotation.)

Your comment that the "the pornwhackers were awesome to drink with. When you stare into the abyss for 8 hours a day, you develop some excellent coping mechanisms" reminded me of an amazing article published on The Verge and written by Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly. [0] (The article was featured here on HN 91 days ago.[1])

The article examines the psychological cost of content moderation and reading it helped me appreciate even more the difficult work content moderators perform to make the web a better place. (Hats off to dang, sctb and others whose user handles I don't know.)

Anyway, here's a teaser from "The Secret Rules of the Internet" in case you missed it the first time it came around.

    > Mora-Blanco sat next to Misty Ewing-Davis, who, having been
    > on the job a few months, counted as an old hand. On the
    > table before them was a single piece of paper, folded in
    > half to show a bullet-point list of instructions: Remove
    > videos of animal abuse. Remove videos showing blood. Remove
    > visible nudity. Remove pornography. Mora-Blanco recalls her
    > teammates were a "mish-mash" of men and women; gay and
    > straight; slightly tipped toward white, but also Indian,
    > African-American, and Filipino. Most of them were friends,
    > friends of friends, or family. They talked and made jokes,
    > trying to make sense of the rules. "You have to find humor,"
    > she remembers. "Otherwise it’s just painful."
    > 
    > Videos arrived on their screens in a never-ending queue.
    > After watching a couple seconds apiece, SQUAD members
    > clicked one of four buttons that appeared in the upper right
    > hand corner of their screens: "Approve" — let the video
    > stand; "Racy" — mark video as 18-plus; "Reject" — remove
    > video without penalty; "Strike" — remove video with a
    > penalty to the account. Click, click, click. But that day
    > Mora-Blanco came across something that stopped her in her
    > tracks.
    > 
    > "Oh, God," she said.
    > 
    > Mora-Blanco won’t describe what she saw that morning. For
    > everyone’s sake, she says, she won’t conjure the
    > staggeringly violent images which, she recalls, involved a
    > toddler and a dimly lit hotel room.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500234

EDIT: formatting