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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

#91

Post by newsclues »

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…

YouTube is a site where people create their own channel, and YouTube moderation is done by people paid by YouTube and bots.

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

#92

Post by ls15 »

meatsauce wrote: post #74
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.

It is also not possible to migrate a community to another platform.

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

#93

Post by iamacyborg »

SilverBirch wrote: post #61

I think the premise of this is off. Instagram doesn't pay people either. The fascinating and difficult part of reddit's business is that almost the entire value of the platform is controlled by moderators. So if you want to influence reddit users you're better of doing deals with the mods than with reddit itself. Of course, because reddit doesn't have any real relationship with the moderators it's very easy for these…

> Instagram doesn't pay people either.

Of course Instagram pays it's moderation team.

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

#95

Post by TremendousJudge »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #81
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…

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 basica…

That's a very cool story, thank you for sharing it.

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

#96

Post by pmoriarty »

It's not just Reddit. All the major "social media" platforms, from YouTube to Facebook thrive off of unpaid work by content creators.

Amazon and IMBD thrive off of user reviews, which provide one of the main sources of value for users of their sites.

That's not to mention all the unpaid work by programmers who write all the open-source/Free software that are the foundation of many/most billion-dollar companies world-wide.

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

#97

Post by pmoriarty »

ls15 wrote: post #92
meatsauce wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"run it however you want" This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.

It is also not possible to migrate a community to another platform.

It's possible, just not easy.

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

#98

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

A defense contractor recently posted an $80 per hour contract near me for non-entry level EE design work.

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

#99

Post by LordKeren »

pmoriarty wrote: post #97
ls15 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also not possible to migrate a community to another platform.

It's possible, just not easy.

No, it is not possible. Reddit moderators don't even have access to the users that are subscribed to their subreddits.

You cannot do anything meaningful on the platform to contact users to let them know you've moved

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

#100

Post by pmoriarty »

LordKeren wrote: post #99
pmoriarty wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, just not easy.

No, it is not possible. Reddit moderators don't even have access to the users that are subscribed to their subreddits. You cannot do anything meaningful on the platform to contact users to let them know you've moved

You could link to an off-site webpage before the ban, and then post details of how to connect to the new site after.

And it's not like users couldn't have had contacts between each other and the moderators and couldn't spread the word about the new community.

That's not to mention the ability to evade bans to spread the word on Reddit itself, if need be.

Spreading the word is actually the relatively easy part... it's migrating all the old content to the new site that isn't made easy by Reddit, because (afaik) it doesn't offer any kind of export feature.. but the site could be scraped.

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