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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

#121

Post by turtlebits »

damsta wrote: post #67
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…

If you create a community that generates ad/gold/whatever revenue for Reddit mods should be able to get at least a bit of it. No communities = no revenue for Reddit.

Going from “doing it for fun” to being paid for it is probably going to destroy the spirit of a community.

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

#122

Post by kkfx »

The platform problem is that people fails to understand that a platform is someone else services.

With Usenet we are all equal, our "free work" is for ourselves in our community, with platforms it's for the owner.

It's NOT different from some people who fails to understand the difference between a local thing and a remote service, just shifted to less IT illiterate people, unfortunately with the very same mechanism...

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

#123

Post by fortuna86 »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #111
juanani wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Should your family pay you to cook, or did you actually cook for them because you like it.

Right, but the benefit is food for your family, not money for a corporation.

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

#125

Post by kelseyfrog »

lostlogin wrote: post #119
kelseyfrog wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home cooking supports every worker and their children as future labor that aggregates into every business entity. A single business entity is not a requirement for this condition. See the entire underground economy of social reproduction.

Reddit’s core business is the comments, and moderation is a requirement. Some (many?jurisdictions have laws around what can legally be written, so moderation becomes important. Cooking food isn’t the core business of my employer.

I mean I guess we can define core business whichever way we want, but if unpaid labor vanished overnight the entire economy would collapse so it actually is fundamentally connected to Reddit whether we like it or not.

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

#127

Post by kcplate »

iamtheworstdev wrote: post #32
kcplate wrote: post #24

People willing to do this for free remind me just a bit too much of all those angry Christian moms in the 80s-90s policing music and video games for “society’s own good.”

oh they're still doing it. Karen's are making youtube videos of themselves crying while listening to rap because "as a mom" it hurts them that their kid could hear it.

I’m glad the algorithm is sparing me of them.

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

#128

Post by rohitb91 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #45

Are the researchers really sure that the moderators on popular subreddits are really 'unpaid'? Recall the whole editor-for-hire scandals that plagued Wikipedia? A PR firm interested in controlling the direction of discussion on Reddit or Wikipedia has a large vested interest in having their paid staff members act as moderators for popular subreddits in order to control the direction of discussion and spike stories th…

I'm 100% sure that happens for the majority of large subs. Along with paid astroturfing on political subreddits.
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