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Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

news.northwestern.edu

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Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#51

Post by engineer_22 »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #43
hideo wrote: post #25

I'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.

Just curious - what kind of expertise do these people bill that amount of money for?

Any white collar professional in engineering (full spectrum) has billing rates over $100 at entry level.

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#52

Post by nineplay »

I've never quite understood why anyone would want to mod the front page subreddits, r/pics, r/funny, r/askreddit etc. It must be a lot of work and your reward for your efforts you get a non-stop stream of abuse from posters who are either pissed off because you're too lazy and let crap content through or pissed off because you're power-hungry and are only letting through posts that support your own personal agenda.

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#53

Post by bpodgursky »

4ggr0 wrote: post #46
bpodgursky wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crude but observationally accurate. The type of person drawn to being a reddit mod: - Does not have a family (no time otherwise) - Does not have a full-time job - Spends an extraordinary amount of time Very Online (aka on reddit) Those are all coupled extremely tightly with a variety of mental health disorders, and you end up with a disproportionate number of people who are anxious, neurotic, bipolar, depressed,…

One can mention all of these points and start a discussion without calling trans people useless, I think that's why this person complained and why the original comment is now flagged. It's also not really based on hard facts, as I doubt that Reddit releases statistics about their mods sexualities. All in all, making an off-topic comment which is just insulting trans people is maybe not the kind of comment we want to…

Yeah. It was not framed in a way useful to the discussion.

I did want to separate out the fact that it was needlessly offensive (true) from the truth of the underlying claim about the distribution (which probably true).

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#54

Post by VoidWhisperer »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #8

I was thinking the other day about all the posting people do on Twitter for free. It's insane how much work people will put in for such little reward or effort except for internet clout.

Some of the more 'successful' of those people end up turning the internet clout into being an influencer which can end up making them a decent amount of money.. but you are right, in the vast majority of cases people won't get anything for the content they contribute to Twitter's platform beyond internet clout

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#55

Post by SoftTalker »

hideo wrote: post #25

I'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.

If they are doing it for free, the value of the labor is zero by definition.

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#56

Post by differentView »

bpodgursky wrote: post #44
jjj123 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment didn’t need the random dig at trans people.

It's crude but observationally accurate. The type of person drawn to being a reddit mod: - Does not have a family (no time otherwise) - Does not have a full-time job - Spends an extraordinary amount of time Very Online (aka on reddit) Those are all coupled extremely tightly with a variety of mental health disorders, and you end up with a disproportionate number of people who are anxious, neurotic, bipolar, depressed,…

Got sources to back up your claims? You sound almost proud of your bigotry.

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#57

Post by immigrantheart »

Every subreddit is also now beginning to just get political, making their job worse.

Majority of frontpage reddits are political subreddits:

/r/whitepeopletwitter

/r/blackpeopletwitter

/r/antiwork

/r/economy (yeah even this now)

/r/workreform

Thankfully the more I browse reddit the more I develop a de-sensitized self to extreme left/right wing. Now I just auto-filter it on my brain. That's a good thing.

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#58

Post by seoaeu »

SoftTalker wrote: post #55
hideo wrote: post #25

I'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.

If they are doing it for free, the value of the labor is zero by definition.

That’s like saying that if you donate to a charity, the value of the goods you gave must be zero because it was a donation

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#59

Post by sweezyjeezy »

engineer_22 wrote: post #51
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious - what kind of expertise do these people bill that amount of money for?

Any white collar professional in engineering (full spectrum) has billing rates over $100 at entry level.

Sure, interested to know what deep moderation expertise involves though.

Re: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

#60

Post by TremendousJudge »

matthewowen wrote: post #33

I find the premise of this... bizarre, I guess? Reddit is a site that lets you create your own community about whatever (within some pretty permissive ToS grounds) you want and run it however you want. Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community? I don't see how it's any more relevant than the labor of all the people posting and voting on content. To be fair it does seem like the group be…

>Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community?

Reddit is a for profit company that makes money off the work of these people. If it wasn't for mods, the site couldn't really exist as it is. Doesn't it seem a bit weird to you? Because it seems to me as though the "value" that this company creates is very much dependent on the free work of the mods (and the posters, for that matter). In the same vein, the reason why Wikimedia is a non-profit, it's because it would be wrong for a company to profit from the work of the unpaid editors that created all the articles and did all the research. Why should reddit be any different?

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