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

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101–110 of 133 posts

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is $80 what the defense contractor is charging their customer?

My company charges $110/hr for an entry level engineer to work on your project.

EDIT: This is just offering a data point.

EDIT EDIT: If we assume a multiple of 2.5 (pretty standard), that $80 becomes $200/hr billed rate.

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

#103
Moderation is cheap. The price the consumer pays for it is having content be removed/filtered/edited because it violates a submission guideline, ToS, or a moderator's worldview. Usually the latter. I don't think you can quantify that value personally. Definitely worth more than a few million dollars for the potential reach.

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

#104
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's right. Value and Cost are not the same.

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

#106
post #22

A 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.

They also curate posts in ways that have nothing to do with the topic.

My local stage and municipality have subreddits. The state subreddit was taken over by political hacks years ago. The municipality subreddit is getting worse and worse.

There’s no obligation at all to administer a regional subreddit in an inclusive way.

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

#107
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's exactly like a donation actually. These people are not forced to be internet janitors, if they don't like it why are they even wasting their time on it. You can't even say that their livelihoods depend on it because they aren't being paid!

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

#108
post #83
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Voluntarily signing up for becoming a moderator for free borders on sociopathy. Some of these people are on a real power trip.

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

#110
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.

It's worse than that. They just added up the number of hours mods spend on Reddit and multiplied it by $20/hr.

That isn't "worth" - that's a "cost" estimate.

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