I had no idea what hell I was getting myself into.

When comments on The Atlantic shut down, I decided to make a tally of my moderation efforts over the past decade. I’ve moderated more than 75,000 comments on my photo essays at The Atlantic since my arrival in 2011. At the Globe, we used a different commenting system, that attracted more engagement: A good estimate for my three years there would be 120,000 moderated comments. I’ll call that an even total of 200,000 comments moderated over 10 years. That’s an average of 55 comments a day, or one new comment to read, evaluate, and approve or delete every 15 to 20 minutes that I’ve been awake since May of 2008. (They rarely came in evenly, though: Usually, it was a few dozen one day, hundreds the next.)

Over these 10 years, comment moderation became deeply habitual for me. I checked the pending comment queue first thing in the morning. I checked it last thing before bed. I checked it dozens of times during the workday, and on every weekend, every vacation. This self-inflicted responsibility of course came on top of any other tasks I had, like the research and production demands of my actual job as a photo editor, and meetings, and family matters, and, you know, living my life.

The relentless grind had a psychological and emotional toll. While moderation was generally a quiet place, letting comments sit in the queue too long would make readers furious. Constantly making judgment calls on other people’s utterances, sometimes by the dozens in stressful circumstances with uncertain boundaries, is draining. My stomach always twisted in a knot of anticipation when I knew a subject I’d just posted might be even slightly controversial. (And I’ve learned that almost anything can become controversial.)

It was never enjoyable to approve comments that I might disagree with, or that attacked me or a photographer directly. But if the comments weren’t abusive or racist, I would generally let them through. My estimate is that between 90 to 95 percent of the comments made it. That remaining 5 to 10 percent, though—I’m glad that I made the effort to never let them show up on any of my stories, even for a second.

One emotional photo story that I put together early in my career was about Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. I’d reached out to several families, asking them for permission to publish some of their personal photos—images of their young children in hospital rooms and in recovery. While putting that story together, I made a mental promise to those families and to every other subject that I might include in a story that I would do my best to keep the comments civil, at least where I had control. I just couldn’t allow some careless troll to leave an unmoderated insult about one of those kids for their parents to see there.