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

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

#71

Post by Dylan16807 »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #60
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 s…

They'd still be making a lot of money if they were non-profit.

And wikipedia doesn't let you make whatever article space you want. If wikimedia started hosting user-controlled wikis I wouldn't say they have the same obligations to those subsites.

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

#72

Post by Dylan16807 »

hideo wrote: post #65
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are not experts in the process of moderation. They are experts in a field and also mod subs in that field.

So they're doing labor but not moderation labor, they could do the same thing with an unprivileged account?

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

#73

Post by smabie »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #60
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 s…

It would be weird to pay people for things that they are willing to do for free?

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

#74

Post by meatsauce »

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…

"run it however you want"

This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.

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

#75

Post by 14 »

Reddit is toxic and the mods are power tripping. That is why they moderate. People who otherwise would have no social status in life where others will listen so they end up on reddit where others have to listen. Of course it is not every singe one of them but a lot of mods are just pathetic. Don’t agree with the narrative - banned. And this will be the downfall of reddit. Inconsistency across the site and unjust bans for merely disagreeing with a mods narrative. I would love to see reddit fail.

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

#76

Post by TremendousJudge »

smabie wrote: post #73
TremendousJudge wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 s…

It would be weird to pay people for things that they are willing to do for free?

Heavens, no, I'm not arguing that. Trying to monetize our free time is what got us into this entire mess in the first place. Just that the dynamic is questionable, since it feels to me as though the company is abusing that willingness in order to make a profit.

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

#77

Post by Taywee »

Yeah, and home cooks do billions of dollars worth of free cooking per year for their friends and family. The fact that something can be valued in dollars doesn't actually mean that it's wrong that it's being done for no monetary compensation. You can put a dollar value on anything, including every constructive hobby, sport, and pastime that people do.

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

#78

Post by reset-password »

hideo wrote: post #65
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are not experts in the process of moderation. They are experts in a field and also mod subs in that field.

They are also not experts in their field. Any time I see a topic in my field on Reddit the comments that imply expert knowledge are virtually guaranteed to be factually incorrect. I've never seen any evidence that a Reddit moderator possesses any special knowledge of any topic. Has your experience been different? Maybe I've just never visited the right subreddits.

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

#79

Post by cecilpl2 »

tehwebguy wrote: post #10

The number cannot possibly be this low

> They found that collectively, the whole Reddit moderator population spends 466 hours per day performing moderating actions on the platform at a minimum.

I agree. 466 hours daily seems at first glance like at least an order of magnitude too low. I would have guessed easily many thousand hours are spent moderating daily.

The study authors did say this was a lower bound.

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