Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

iron0013 wrote: post #37

I haven't been paying too much attention to the whole thing, but is this related to the transphobic moderators who resigned a few weeks ago? I don't understand the motivations of all the players in this game--people would really try to shut down SO rather than just address each other by their preferred pronouns? That's wild to me

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #33

harshreality wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderators are doing it out of their own self interest, too. They're not doing it for money, so if they aren't enjoying it they can quit with zero repercussions, right? ETA: So because of the psychic toll that it may or may not take on volunteer moderators, moderating for free for a for-profit company is illegal? I guess I can understand this: It's half protecting people from getting into an unhealthy psychological t…

Yes and that's pretty much the definition of volunteering too. Volunteers get laws and protections to prevent exploitation, which is what the NY laws were probably created to prevent. Turns out that the genuine and thorny question of free labor keeping Reddit/FB and other platforms alive is going to be tackled via NY laws. (Yes, FB also has its own paid moderators and outsourced staff who suffer PTSD etc.) I for one…

Post by jmkni » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

jsonne wrote: post #29

Seems like there's also a good case for Reddit moderators to not be volunteers as well. To be honest I've always thought the community moderated model has seemed like somewhat of a loophole that was eventually going to be closed. It's having your cake and eating it too. IMHO you can either have UGI with a professional moderator team OR you can have professionally made content with no moderator team.

Post by adrianmonk » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

pimterry wrote: post #28

adrianmonk wrote: post #25

Why just moderating? In a sense, it's every action you do that adds value to the site by drawing people in or improving their experience. When users write a comment (such as what I'm writing right now on Hacker News), they are acting as writers who generate text for people to read. When they submit a link, they are locating content for people to read. When they upvote or downvote, they are acting somewhat like editor…

It's not about unpaid work though, it's employee-like unpaid work. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/337123/345240 has some interesting discussion of this. In practice, that means that normal commenters or people using social media aren't relevant for two reasons: * There's minimal control over their actions from the 'employer'. There's some basic rules on what content is not allowed, but nobody says "you must write a…

Post by DoctorNick » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

adrianmonk wrote: post #25

Why just moderating? In a sense, it's every action you do that adds value to the site by drawing people in or improving their experience. When users write a comment (such as what I'm writing right now on Hacker News), they are acting as writers who generate text for people to read. When they submit a link, they are locating content for people to read. When they upvote or downvote, they are acting somewhat like editor…