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Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

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Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#91

Post by hombre_fatal »

RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #87
hombre_fatal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's like you're saying volunteer work should never exist. You absolutely have employee-like duties at the volunteer soup kitchen and basically any volunteer outfit. If someone really is just doing something to keep themselves busy and they are perfectly happy not being paid, then that seems like a fair deal to me. I've done that when my buddy started a bar at the beach. I would help him take orders while I sat…

The critical distinction here is that a soup kitchen is not a for-profit venture, but Stack Exchange is.

It's certainly not a distinction users care about. And apparently it's not the distinction the law cares about either since it's clearly much more complex than that.

My forum is for-profit and users will line up around the block to be a moderator. Why is it that the only compensation we can wrap our heads around is money?

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#92

Post by vonmoltke »

Spooky23 wrote: post #44
fweespeech wrote: post #26

Reason #4000 to not have a physical presence in the state of New York. I'm sorry but this law is kinda ridiculous.

What state allows for-profit organizations to solicit unpaid volunteer labor from people outside of prison? It’s a pretty obvious violation of Federal law and multiple state laws.

> What state allows for-profit organizations to solicit unpaid volunteer labor from people outside of prison?

I'm not aware of a state that allows that for people inside prison, either. Well, not technically. They get paid, it's just a lot less than someone on the outside would make.

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#93

Post by deevolution »

pimterry wrote: post #28
adrianmonk wrote: post #25

Why just moderating? In a sense, it's every action you do that adds value to the site by drawing people in or improving their experience. When users write a comment (such as what I'm writing right now on Hacker News), they are acting as writers who generate text for people to read. When they submit a link, they are locating content for people to read. When they upvote or downvote, they are acting somewhat like editor…

It's not about unpaid work though, it's employee-like unpaid work. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/337123/345240 has some interesting discussion of this. In practice, that means that normal commenters or people using social media aren't relevant for two reasons: * There's minimal control over their actions from the 'employer'. There's some basic rules on what content is not allowed, but nobody says "you must write a…

checkout the steemit platform for an example of an online community where all forms of contributing, as long as people believe it added value, can be rewarded. The content is mostly crypto related, but I think its an interesting alternative to our current reputation based models because it means you can transfer the value you contributed to that site into real money whereas reputation is non transferable accross different platoforms.

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#95

Post by danShumway »

jasonlotito wrote: post #88
danShumway wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all Open Source companies are nonprofit. See Redhat Linux, Gitlab, Chromium, Docker. If a volunteer helps triage issues for these projects, is it a violation of labor laws? If only nonprofit Open Source companies can use the benefits of Open Source development -- community involvement, community moderation and support, 3rd-party patches, etc... that's a really big reduction in who can participate in Open Source,…

This is begging the question. > If only nonprofit Open Source companies can use the benefits of Open Source development -- community involvement, community moderation and support, 3rd-party patches, There is more involved here than any one of those things mentioned. There are certain requirements that need to be met. You listed the five criteria New York has, and so in New York's case, those requirements would have t…

Sure, but... that's what I asked. I wanted someone to expand on the requirements that had to be met.

Would anyone be willing to explain in more detail on how the criteria differ and why this doesn't apply to Open Source companies like Gitlab/Wikipedia/etc?

I brought up for-profit companies like Gitlab only to clarify why I thought drawing a bright line based on purely nonprofit status as the only distinction would have negative consequences.

> This is literally the distinction discussed in the posted question and is pretty standard law in the US. What negative consequences do you see as a result of this?

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#96

Post by MoronInAHurry »

wolfgke wrote: post #72
MoronInAHurry wrote: post #60

A bunch of non-lawyers taking a tiny chunk of law in isolation and speculating about whether something "seems illegal" based on it is really, really useless. And this HN thread is just going to be even more of that.

> A bunch of non-lawyers taking a tiny chunk of law in isolation and speculating about whether something "seems illegal" based on it is really, really useless. To me, this is rather a sign that the law is far too complicated and should be radically simplified.

All laws start out as simple concepts. Then they need to be applied to reality, where very few situations are simple.

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#97

Post by mertd »

criddell wrote: post #36
jsonne wrote: post #29

Seems like there's also a good case for Reddit moderators to not be volunteers as well. To be honest I've always thought the community moderated model has seemed like somewhat of a loophole that was eventually going to be closed. It's having your cake and eating it too. IMHO you can either have UGI with a professional moderator team OR you can have professionally made content with no moderator team.

Maybe Reddit should be turned into a shopping mall type of business where subs can be run however the sub mods want, but they have to pay a monthly rent to Reddit. I wonder if that would make things better or worse there?

r/NBA brought to you by Huawei.

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#98

Post by SnarkAsh »

While we're discussing Stack Overflow's legal situation:

- Users have raised $9000 to defend a volunteer moderator from defamation by Stack Overflow employees: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming...

- Stack Overflow illegally changed the content license without permission from authors (Creative Commons allows such license changes for adaptations but not collections such as Stack Exchange) and refuse to clarify their legal justification (do they feel they have the right to change to any license they choose?): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

- Their general counsel appears to have left the company a little before all of this happened: https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/80154...

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#99

Post by pflats »

Macha wrote: post #39
jsonne wrote: post #29

Seems like there's also a good case for Reddit moderators to not be volunteers as well. To be honest I've always thought the community moderated model has seemed like somewhat of a loophole that was eventually going to be closed. It's having your cake and eating it too. IMHO you can either have UGI with a professional moderator team OR you can have professionally made content with no moderator team.

I think Reddit moderators are less restricted/directed by Reddit so they fall closer on the spectrum to the guy running a debate club/whatever at the local community centre. I don't think anyone would argue that they're an employee of the community centre, even if the community centre prohibited alcohol at their events.

I like your point, but I go back and forth on this. Rules are different for non-profits and volunteers, so let's make sure we're focusing on a for-profit function hall, not a local community center.

As far as I can tell, Reddit exerts minimal control over its moderators, and seems to treat them like normal users who happened to get more buttons to press (perhaps by design for this very issue). That seems to me like they're not unpaid employees.

At the same time, I'm reasonably certain that if the moderators of, say the "aww" subreddit, decided as a whole that they were only going to use their moderator powers 5 times a day each, Reddit would step in.

And that brings me back around the other way. Reddit relies on its moderators, for sure.

But is the lack of control they exert over mods the true status quo? Or is the lack of control just because it's convenient?

If I'm running debate club at the function hall and it gets wildly popular, the biggest scene around. I'm sure the owners would be thrilled. If I then decide that anyone who says "um" more once is no longer welcome, I imagine the popularity would wane. The hall might be really cranky about lost concessions. They might try to find someone else to run their own debate club and counter-program mine. They might even cancel my lease and get a new debate club going in the same room. But they're not going to step in and replace me as the moderator of my own debate club.

So... I don't know!

Re: Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

#100

Post by ashelmire »

maxerickson wrote: post #85
MoronInAHurry wrote: post #60

A bunch of non-lawyers taking a tiny chunk of law in isolation and speculating about whether something "seems illegal" based on it is really, really useless. And this HN thread is just going to be even more of that.

The funniest thing is there is implicit discussion of a remedy other than New York users being banned from activities that qualify as work.

IANAL, but it is generally illegal to volunteer for a for-profit organization federally. See the Fair Labor Standards Act and Dept of Labor site [1].

The most relevant recent test I can find resulted in a settlement, when AOL paid people who contributed articles without payment[2]. There's been some conflicting decisions in other related cases and many are still in progress.

1.https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp 2. https://archives.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/aol_settled_with_...

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