I was once a moderator at /r/ApplyingToCollege and other college related subreddits. When I started, there were about 20,000 subscribers, and when I left it was in the hundreds of thousands; now it's one of the largest college admissions forums in the world. It was worth it for me to help underprivileged students get high quality information about college and financial aid options, and then see those same students get into excellent colleges. It was quite a lot of work and most moderators on that subreddit did not last more than a year.
Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
21–30 of 133 posts
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#22A lot of them are not impartial moderators. They are more concerned with maintaining their echo chambers. So I highly doubt the labour is worth that much.
I do not see what your conclusion has to do with your premise.
Subreddits have topics and rules. Moderators curate posts to suit those topics and rules. This has value.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#23You can think of it as free work, of you can think of it as people building something they care about. When I post on here I don't think of it as free work but more as contributing to a community I want to be part of.
Moderating content is not equivalent to posting.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#24People willing to do this for free remind me just a bit too much of all those angry Christian moms in the 80s-90s policing music and video games for “society’s own good.”
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#25I'd wager this is an extremely low estimate about the value of that labor. From the paper it seems like they compared with freelance moderators on upwork.
I'm a part of a couple of super niche subreddits where there are moderators with deep expertise in the area. I know that IRL some of these mods are often billing $100s/hour for their work but on reddit they do it free, and they freely dispense the same advice.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#26Yet if they were paid they’d probably be found wanting from a professional viewpoint.
If they were paid they could be asked to maintain certain standards as conditions of employment that you can't really expect from a volunteer.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#27Unpaid labor is worth what you're paid for it if other people will do it for free. Reddit no more owes a debt to these moderators than you owe the guy who cleans your windshield without permission.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#28You can think of it as free work, of you can think of it as people building something they care about. When I post on here I don't think of it as free work but more as contributing to a community I want to be part of.
Moderating content is not equivalent to posting.
Moderating is a part of community building and growing, however.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#29I wonder if a DAO would be possible, that distributes the ad revenue of a Reddit like system to the moderators of the forums. Writing the code seems to be not too hard. Advertisers could send funds to a smart contract which in return gives them a token which enables them to display ads for a certain amount of time. Each piece of ad revenue could be distributed to the moderators of the forum that generated it. Would t…
You don't need anything close to something that complicated.
I guess you mean a traditional Reddit clone could also pay the mods?
I'm not sure.
1: It is quite a lot of bureaucratic work to set up a business that can pay small amounts to many people around the world.
2: Signing up as a mod would be way more complicated. There would be a KYC processes. A different one for each country. There would be VAT and invoice processes that are different for each country. Some countries could simply not take part. As there are many pairs of countries A and B where A has a law "Business with people from country B is illegal".
3: As a mod, you would always be living in fear that the company that runs the system kicks you out. And all your hard work (maybe of years!) goes down the drain.
4: Earning small amount of fiat money is also very annoying if you do not already have a business. Suddenly you have figure out all the complexities around how do declare taxes. It would probably usually not worth it for mods who are not already running a business.
Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
#30So what you're saying is
>he does it for free