I was going to refrain from leaving drive-by comments on week-old posts, but this rang a lot of bells from modding the Les Mis kinkmeme. I started that thing on a lark in 2009 when Les Mis was still a tiny fandom, and was seriously impressed that it accrued about a thousand comments in three years... now it's averaging 300 comments a day, and the difference is qualitative, not just quantitative. The organizational overhead--fills post, chatter post, multiple rounds--is so much greater and so much more necessary, there's stuff like prompt freezes that I didn't even know about because it's only necessary on megafandom prompt memes (and it still makes my tiny-fandom hindbrain go NO NO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT), the need to have coherent rules and policies grows and grows with the size of the meme. The need to document shit grows as the thing snowballs and attracts LJ newbies and people who've never kinkmemed before. And the pull in different directions from people who desperately want incompatible things rears its head, especially re warnings policy and "move to Dreamwidth? stay on LJ? stay on LJ with custom comment pages? no I hate the custom pages they don't work in my browser" etc.
Plus stuff that's specific to modding, like the need to decide between constant, active, frequently ruthless modding and letting wank take over the meme. But again, qualitative differences, because there's a near-zero probability that one inflammatory comment will make a low-volume comm go off like a bomb in the time it takes me to write up a mod note. Small-fandom mods can be pretty hands-off and still intervene in time to keep things from getting ugly; megafandoms are tinderboxes, and there is an explicit choice between maintaining a reasonably civil and pleasant space and allowing people the freedom to walk around with open cans of gasoline. (Or maybe that's just Les Mis fandom? LM fandom doesn't seem to grok cheerfully abrasive disagreement at all; it's divided between over-earnest "you're oppressing me by having an opinion" and people blatantly trolling the over-earnest types.)
So yes, in conclusion, herding megafandom cats = brain-breakingly different, and not just in terms of volume.
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Plus stuff that's specific to modding, like the need to decide between constant, active, frequently ruthless modding and letting wank take over the meme. But again, qualitative differences, because there's a near-zero probability that one inflammatory comment will make a low-volume comm go off like a bomb in the time it takes me to write up a mod note. Small-fandom mods can be pretty hands-off and still intervene in time to keep things from getting ugly; megafandoms are tinderboxes, and there is an explicit choice between maintaining a reasonably civil and pleasant space and allowing people the freedom to walk around with open cans of gasoline. (Or maybe that's just Les Mis fandom? LM fandom doesn't seem to grok cheerfully abrasive disagreement at all; it's divided between over-earnest "you're oppressing me by having an opinion" and people blatantly trolling the over-earnest types.)
So yes, in conclusion, herding megafandom cats = brain-breakingly different, and not just in terms of volume.