121–130 of 155 posts
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The official limit is no activity for 6 months, at that point the moderator status is supposed to be removed. This has been enforced rather inconsistently at times.
But does that mean that the moderator can just take one action every six months and retain their status? You couldn't do that in a job!
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.
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.
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…
All reasonable people understand the difference.
Wouldn’t social networks fall under a similar category? I get that they are different but there is a lot of overlap. If they are in violation then I think the law needs to be updated.
Reddit certainly would. Moderating a top subreddit is definitely as much work as most part time jobs, and essential to that site actually being good.
AFAIK, Reddit doesn't organizationally require their community mods to do anything at all.
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The fact remains that moderating forums is labor, and stack exchange receives a lot of value from that labor that the mods themselves don't see a dime of.
I run a forum and there's no shortage of people who would happily volunteer for a mod role. You have it wrong though: they get plenty of compensation through reputation, clout, and a feeling of power over their peers and being heard and helping out in a community that they love (or some combo of these). That's why they do it. Why is that not a fair trade without money exchanging hands? Growing up, I used to mow an ag…
There's no shortage of people who want to be rulers of a community. Of those, it is always hard to find the ones who are actually fit for that purpose.
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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 ha…
> 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 mean, they don't meet the criteria because they don't. I guess I should ask: why do you think they meet all the criteria? What specific reasons makes you think that?
- Degree of Control Exercised
Gitlab has the final say over every pull request, on what issues they'll consider pull requests for. Gitlab has a code of conduct and can ban contributors that violate that code. Gitlab prioritizes and labels issues that they want volunteers to look at. Seems equivalent to Stack Exchange's moderation queue.
- Profit, Loss, and Investment
Gitlab is a for-profit company. Open Source contributions get rolled up into their for-profit enterprise offerings.
- Skill and Independent Initiative
Fixing issues requires a great deal of specialized skill with the codebase, some of which is codebase specific and not generalizable. Individuals can choose to participate (similarly to Stack Exchange), but individuals are not free to pursue any project they want. Participation means following Gitlab's design process and looking at issue labels.
Similarly to Stack Exchange moderation queue, Gitlab hands me a list of issues that are ready for development and I pick out the issues that I want to work on.
- Permanence of Relationship
Volunteer developers to Open Source projects often form long-term relationships with the projects they contribute to. An answer on the main post links to a 2009 guidance letter that calls out for a for-profit nursing home as being in violation of the law for bringing in volunteers to help with events.[0]
With that letter as context, it's not clear to me whether or not permanence requires an explicit contract, or just an understanding that the activity or event is not a rare, one-off occurrence.
- Integral Part of Business
Developing software is an integral part of Gitlab's core business.
It's true that volunteers don't do all of Gitlab's development, but is that a defense? If I was illegally exploiting employees by classifying them as volunteers, I couldn't just say, "but I only did it to a few of them." As far as I can see, the law doesn't say, "you can classify up to 10% of your core employees as unpaid volunteers."
IANAL, I'm only here because I'm curious about any aspects of the law I'm missing.
[0]: https://www.labor.ny.gov/legal/counsel/pdf/Volunteers-Intern...
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> 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.
An operating system provide a few set of basic services to applications, but the linux kernel is some gazillion lines of code, because it has to work with reality
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.
Not really. Reddit doesn't claim ownership of the subreddits. A subreddit is something 1 user creates, getting ownership of that subreddit, and then that 1 user is free to appoint other mods. This is more akin to a facebook group.
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 just became aware of this whole "powermod" phenomena where individual mods oversee many subs. Like 30+. I just recently learned about them but I guess they're sort of admins favorites since they essentially do their bidding while still looking like "part of the community". Totally feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.