Before working as a moderator, I never would have known how many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn. Now, having done the job, I know that that’s a trick question, because the answer is: immediately. It will happen on the first comment and keep on going until the last one.

If you’ve ever spent any time reading comments on a website, you’re no doubt surprised to find out that anybody had deleted anything. The internet often seems like a lawless wasteland. But there was a law. And it was me.

In case you’re curious about what called for deletion, here are the guidelines: Anything that was overtly racist, sexist, homophobic or violent had to be deleted. Along with spam. So much spam. Hundreds of links a day to jobs that promised riches while working at home. I worked at home. I was not getting riches. I was losing a part of me every day. You read the comments and you feel awful. You take down comments and people get angry. You ban certain slurs and then people create new ones. The resilience they show is heartbreaking. They get angry at the fact that they’re not allowed to say certain things. They never seemed to ask themselves why they thought they needed to say them in the first place.

It was an easy job for the most part. And I used to joke about how easy it was. I worked in my underwear a lot of times. I went jogging at lunch. It was a job, though, and like all jobs, it took its toll. Sometimes, the only human contact I had all day was with racist avatars on a webpage and then different avatars on a different page wanting to discuss what we were going to do about the other avatars. I’d go out to meet friends after doing that all day and have absolutely no idea how to talk to real non-avatar people.

This was the only job that made me cry. I’ve had jobs where I got chewed out by bosses or customers. That’s not fun. I’ve had to deal with people who made me angry, but this was the only job that made me lose faith in humanity. The night Trayvon Martin died, before his body was even cold, I had to work through hundreds of comments about how he deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I sat at my computer and cried.