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I’ve noticed a number of users saying that the mods are doing things that are actually the work of staff members. A moderator named Jill has repeatedly tried to make the distinction clear, but I’m afraid it’s still not enough to get users to understand. Can anyone list out all the differences between mods and staff?

Mods are gay, staff are gayer.

Actual answer. Mods mainly clean up comments, images, videos, meme pages, and ban or warn users for various reasons. You know, they "moderate" the community. Make sure things don't go too far.

Whereas the Staff have more control of the site itself. Anything beyond what I listed above is typically what a staff member can do. Stuff like the front page, the site layout, and gallery lock downs. You know, high level stuff like that.

A lot of users tend to mix them up since Mods are far more active with the community compared to staff members, so they tend to get the blame for things they have no control over.

At least that's what I think.

Mostly correct. Entry mods can also lock down galleries if need be, though. Site layout stuff is handled by a different team entirely separate from mods or staff. Then there's the Meme Insider people who mostly post filler pieces like the "Top 25" lists and such.

Steven The Pirate wrote:

Mods are gay, staff are gayer.

Tbh, I don't think we know if any of the staff are some letter of LGBT+, they generally keep that stuff private. -But nomatter what they are, mods are infinitely gayer.-

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Staff are people paid to work on the site. Don is the most (in)famous. There have been a lot of people who used to work for the site who have left. Jamie Dubs, amanda b., Brad, Ari Spool. James works on running of the site itself. He did leave for a bit but came back IIRC. User LiterallyAustin appears to be another staff member involved with coding according to the pfp. There are a few other staff members of course: Adam, Brandon, Zach, Philipp, and Stevo. From what I can tell, at least a few of them have backgrounds in journalism.

Then there are also Meme Insider contributors that are kind of staff(?) We haven't gotten a clear answer on that.

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With the exception of Captain Blubber getting an Amazon gift card over a decade ago, none of the mods have been paid. -We do it for the love of the game.- These are generally [☆] users that have been active on the site for several years and were noticed by other moderators to be seen as competent enough at something to be trusted with more power over things. Users who use the scrapbooker ability a lot and use it well were seen as potential image mods. Users who made a lot of good entries and edits on entries were seen as potential entry mods. Generally, you have to be already somewhat known on the site and have been proven to make real contributions while also not actively making things worse. We did have a few suggested mods that didn't make the cut because of this. Likewise, a few mods had their modship revoked over 'making things worse'. Mods have a random array of backgrounds, with a shared interest in the memes first, with documentation and articles existing to serve that. Staff merely adopted the memes. Mods were born in them, molded by them.

There is a much longer list of mods but more of them have left than are active. A lot of them put in a huge amount of effort into the site, but many never saw their efforts pay off. Or maybe life just got in the way. Like, it's insane how much work Rivers did in site stats, and a lot of mods are still in the top 100 of various site metrics despite not being active for literal years.

[☆] I say mostly because there have been some users with "moderator" badge that just sort of showed up out of nowhere. They nor the Admins (to my knowledge) have ever communicated with the mod team about why they are mods. Indeed, they have been known to not follow site rules on tagging and sourcing which would be a hard no on modship if mods had a say in it.

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Staff are responsible for how the site runs. From User Interface, to what makes the frontpage. Sometimes mods get privileged insight before changes happen, but mods are not calling the shots on any of that. At best we can suggest things, and often, it is only additive. We don't really have the ability to say "hey, the site's users really don't want this on the frontpage" and have it do anything. Even of the stuff we do suggest, from entries that moderators worked on, to random images that we find that might be worth showing to a wider audience: There is also no obligation for staff to listen to our suggestions, or even acknowledge them. We generally never find out why something we suggested was never frontpaged. There was a point where I had hoped that only suggesting a few things, that maybe it would make the stuff I was suggesting be seen as 'more important'. This didn't have an effect. I had to learn to stop caring about the frontpage years ago because of how frustrating dealing with this was.