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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

#81

Post by cecilpl2 »

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…

I once worked on a video game that was translated into many different languages for free by passionate community members. Since the game was frequently updated, eventually it made sense to give these "community translators" early access to new text. Also it made sense for them to provide their translations in a form our pipeline could consume. Voila, they have unpaid jobs.

I skipped a bunch of steps there, but basically through no malicious intent on anyone's part, people's passion was leveraged into making them work jobs with expectations and deliverables. Of course they were free to not do the work, but they'd be letting their community down if they didn't.

At that point we had an internal discussion about the ethics of the system, and wound up deciding we should pay them.

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

#82

Post by rat9988 »

reset-password wrote: post #78
hideo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has your experience been different?

He is claiming it's different. It's his whole point.

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

#83

Post by LanceH »

mrala wrote: post #23
120photo wrote: post #17

You 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.

You're right. It's far more powerful than posting. Maybe they should be paying to be moderators, since they get extra influence over the conversations.

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

#84

Post by ls15 »

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…

> I don't see how it's any more relevant than the labor of all the people posting and voting on content.

Moderating a reasonably large subreddit is a lot of work, compared to voting. A bit every day, all days of the year. Reddit even automatically prompts you to review new threads with a lot of participation. I've also received offers for paid (low) jobs from reddit in my inbox for new communities that they wanted to build. Did I mention the drama that ensues when community members aren't happy? "Ban this!" / "Don't censor this!"

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

#86

Post by bryan_w »

TekMol wrote: post #29
ta988 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

If doing the world wide paperwork is too hard, then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to grow so large.

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

#87

Post by juanani »

Taywee wrote: post #77

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.

Except those who benefit from home cooking are your family and friends, not the investor class/ad traders. Cant see how this relates at all..

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

#88

Post by jfim »

Taywee wrote: post #77

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.

Home cooking doesn't have a single business entity that aggregates this value though. Reddit would be worth much less without this free labor, as well as most other social media companies would without user generated comment.
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