I was thinking the other day about all the posting people do on Twitter for free. It's insane how much work people will put in for such little reward or effort except for internet clout.
Some of the more 'successful' of those people end up turning the internet clout into being an influencer which can end up making them a decent amount of money.. but you are right, in the vast majority of cases people won't get anything for the content they contribute to Twitter's platform beyond internet clout
I don't understand this post. People do all sorts of things for enjoyment and self-expression. All sorts of communities pop up like poetry slams, pick up sports activities. Like just because Twitter gets value out of it somehow means people shouldn't want to do it? Isn't the ideal business one where people feel like they get equal value out of an exchange?
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.
Plenty of folks are making a lot of money out there maintaining an echo chamber (facebook, many politically-aligned news websites on all sides) on the internet, so while I agree that it's maybe not great for society, it does seem to work pretty well for capitalists.
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.
> They found that collectively, the whole Reddit moderator population spends 466 hours per day performing moderating actions on the platform at a minimum.
I agree. 466 hours daily seems at first glance like at least an order of magnitude too low. I would have guessed easily many thousand hours are spent moderating daily.
AOL’s settlement with volunteers drew out super clear conditions for community moderators to exist without ever getting paid and it’s the playbook all social media sites with community moderation follow.
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 could simply not take part. As there are many pairs of countries A and B where A has a law "Business with people from country B is illegal".
3: As a mod, you would always be living in fear that the company that runs the system kicks you out. And all your hard work (maybe of years!) goes down the drain.
4: Earning small amount of fiat money is also very annoying if you do not already have a business. Suddenly you have figure out all the complexities around how do declare taxes. It would probably usually not worth it for mods who are not already running a business.
Or Reddit could just pay some of their ad money to their mods. They already have all the stats on what ads are displayed where, and a functioning ad system, how is involving a shitty slow energy-wasting database run by a bunch of strangers going to help?
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.
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.
I was once a moderator at /r/ApplyingToCollege and other college related subreddits. When I started, there were about 20,000 subscribers, and when I left it was in the hundreds of thousands; now it's one of the largest college admissions forums in the world. It was worth it for me to help underprivileged students get high quality information about college and financial aid options, and then see those same students get into excellent colleges. It was quite a lot of work and most moderators on that subreddit did not last more than a year.
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.
It's crude but observationally accurate. The type of person drawn to being a reddit mod:
- Does not have a family (no time otherwise)
- Does not have a full-time job
- Spends an extraordinary amount of time Very Online (aka on reddit)
Those are all coupled extremely tightly with a variety of mental health disorders, and you end up with a disproportionate number of people who are anxious, neurotic, bipolar, depressed, and with gender spectrum disorders.
One can mention all of these points and start a discussion without calling trans people useless, I think that's why this person complained and why the original comment is now flagged.
It's also not really based on hard facts, as I doubt that Reddit releases statistics about their mods sexualities.
All in all, making an off-topic comment which is just insulting trans people is maybe not the kind of comment we want to see on HN. Ironically, I could see such a comment gaining traction on certain subreddits.
Yeah. It was not framed in a way useful to the discussion.
I did want to separate out the fact that it was needlessly offensive (true) from the truth of the underlying claim about the distribution (which probably true).
I'd wager this is an extremely low estimate about the value of that labor. From the paper it seems like they compared with freelance moderators on upwork.
I'm a part of a couple of super niche subreddits where there are moderators with deep expertise in the area. I know that IRL some of these mods are often billing $100s/hour for their work but on reddit they do it free, and they freely dispense the same advice.
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.
Even trades do it. Electricians, HVAC, and moreso for commercial jobs.
The difference is in who is doing the charging. White collar professionals usually pay themselves and thus keep most of the money.
When it's a trade the company gets 80/hr with the techs making about 20/hr.In California of course more is charged and more is paid but its still a slap in the face. You are literally the kne doing all but administration/dispatch which is the easy part. As soon as tradesmen with can they usually start working for themselves, hire more people, and perpetuate the parasitic cycle.
Without getting into too much detail some of these are software/hardware (e.g. niche libraries and tools used in very specific industries) and some are non tech (maintenance for specific types of vehicles, animal care, etc)
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!
Unpaid labor is worth what you're paid for it if other people will do it for free. Reddit no more owes a debt to these moderators than you owe the guy who cleans your windshield without permission.
Except you never had any wipers installed because why bother when destitute people will clean your windshield for free. So if they ever stop, your car will crash into the first available wall.
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 behind this study is also interested in the latter too. I'm just not sure I agree with the premise any more than I would agree with the premise that people calling each other on the phone are providing free labor to the phone company since you normally have to pay professionals (eg radio hosts) to produce audio content.
>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 same vein, the reason why Wikimedia is a non-profit, it's because it would be wrong for a company to profit from the work of the unpaid editors that created all the articles and did all the research. Why should reddit be any different?
They'd still be making a lot of money if they were non-profit.
And wikipedia doesn't let you make whatever article space you want. If wikimedia started hosting user-controlled wikis I wouldn't say they have the same obligations to those subsites.
Heavens, no, I'm not arguing that. Trying to monetize our free time is what got us into this entire mess in the first place. Just that the dynamic is questionable, since it feels to me as though the company is abusing that willingness in order to make a profit.
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.
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.
That's true, and unfortunate, on one hand you want them to get paid for the work they put in, on the other hand it could introduce a chaos. How could that be solved?
Maybe for the long-tail, but the largest subreddits are far from pet projects. I am under the impression that being a mod on a sub with millions of subscribers is at least a part time job and it's hard to imagine what Reddit would be like without the largest, most popular subreddits. In those cases, I think the premise of the study seems fair.
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.
Reddit may have some high profile cases where they banned a subreddit, I find Reddit rather tolerant. For example, there are several longstanding subreddits dealing with kinky sex, drugs, and kinky sex on drugs. Opposite and controversial viewpoints have their subreddits: prolife and prochoice, progun and guncontrol, vim and emacs, etc...
Most bans are for really terrible communities, and yes, for a few of them, I think it went a bit too far, I wouldn't have banned the_donald for instance, despite not wanting to have anything to do with them. Really, they do the minimum acceptable for a mainstream service.
> 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!"
community-owned forums are a social good, it's silly to describe this as a job that reddit should do on their behalf
this is like saying that stopping yourself from eating a donut is worth money to the state because the state pays for healthcare, and would otherwise have to put a cop in your kitchen, and cops make $x/hour, etc
'unpaid cyclists perform labor worth $100mm / year to citibike'
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 that don't fit their desired narrative, whether that be on behalf of a government or a corporation or an individual. This is hardly a new problem, see this story from 2012:
> "Perhaps the paid-PR scandal is a coming of age for Wikipedia in the era of SEO shills, and the public's increasing awareness about powerful corners of the Internet -- and how subject they can be to the interests of close-knit friends and business associates. In this light, a Web site as insanely valuable as Wikipedia will always attract gaming for promotion."
This is hardly just the moderators on Reddit, there's also the armies of upvote and downvote bots that can be deployed to push a story to the top or bury it, ditto with comments, and then there's things like the outright bans for anyone raising particularly controversial topics (bans for mentioning the Wuhan lab leak on Reddit is one of the more blatant ones, for example).
All in all, social media is not what anyone in their right mind would call a 'reliable unbiased information source'.
I've never quite understood why anyone would want to mod the front page subreddits, r/pics, r/funny, r/askreddit etc. It must be a lot of work and your reward for your efforts you get a non-stop stream of abuse from posters who are either pissed off because you're too lazy and let crap content through or pissed off because you're power-hungry and are only letting through posts that support your own personal agenda.
That may be true but it's a good example of the kind of negativity they face. I suppose it surprises me how much the front page of reddit relies on either wanna-be hall monitors with egos of steel or paid astroturfers who are officially disallowed and are smart enough to hide their motivations.
It seems fragile. If a few hundred people said f*it, would reddit collapse overnight?
132 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadThe idea behind the superfan doing all your work has been studied and worked with for some time.
People on the internet will do an amazing amount of work for recognition or just meaningless internet points.
A great write-up on the matter: https://www.amazon.ca/Science-Social-Beyond-Likes-Followers-...
You used to be able to get this free from the Lithium website, but that might be gone now.
Subreddits have topics and rules. Moderators curate posts to suit those topics and rules. This has value.
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.
If the latter i expect it to be magnitudes too high.
I agree. 466 hours daily seems at first glance like at least an order of magnitude too low. I would have guessed easily many thousand hours are spent moderating daily.
The study authors did say this was a lower bound.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
there's definitely some places where reddit needs more paid moderation, but the volunteer moderator is an essential role.
Writing the code seems to be not too hard.
Advertisers could send funds to a smart contract which in return gives them a token which enables them to display ads for a certain amount of time.
Each piece of ad revenue could be distributed to the moderators of the forum that generated it.
Would there be any major hurdles for such a DAO to get traction?
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 could simply not take part. As there are many pairs of countries A and B where A has a law "Business with people from country B is illegal".
3: As a mod, you would always be living in fear that the company that runs the system kicks you out. And all your hard work (maybe of years!) goes down the drain.
4: Earning small amount of fiat money is also very annoying if you do not already have a business. Suddenly you have figure out all the complexities around how do declare taxes. It would probably usually not worth it for mods who are not already running a business.
- Does not have a family (no time otherwise)
- Does not have a full-time job
- Spends an extraordinary amount of time Very Online (aka on reddit)
Those are all coupled extremely tightly with a variety of mental health disorders, and you end up with a disproportionate number of people who are anxious, neurotic, bipolar, depressed, and with gender spectrum disorders.
It's also not really based on hard facts, as I doubt that Reddit releases statistics about their mods sexualities.
All in all, making an off-topic comment which is just insulting trans people is maybe not the kind of comment we want to see on HN. Ironically, I could see such a comment gaining traction on certain subreddits.
I did want to separate out the fact that it was needlessly offensive (true) from the truth of the underlying claim about the distribution (which probably true).
I'm a part of a couple of super niche subreddits where there are moderators with deep expertise in the area. I know that IRL some of these mods are often billing $100s/hour for their work but on reddit they do it free, and they freely dispense the same advice.
He is claiming it's different. It's his whole point.
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.
The difference is in who is doing the charging. White collar professionals usually pay themselves and thus keep most of the money.
When it's a trade the company gets 80/hr with the techs making about 20/hr.In California of course more is charged and more is paid but its still a slap in the face. You are literally the kne doing all but administration/dispatch which is the easy part. As soon as tradesmen with can they usually start working for themselves, hire more people, and perpetuate the parasitic cycle.
>he does it for free
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 behind this study is also interested in the latter too. I'm just not sure I agree with the premise any more than I would agree with the premise that people calling each other on the phone are providing free labor to the phone company since you normally have to pay professionals (eg radio hosts) to produce audio content.
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 same vein, the reason why Wikimedia is a non-profit, it's because it would be wrong for a company to profit from the work of the unpaid editors that created all the articles and did all the research. Why should reddit be any different?
And wikipedia doesn't let you make whatever article space you want. If wikimedia started hosting user-controlled wikis I wouldn't say they have the same obligations to those subsites.
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.
This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.
You cannot do anything meaningful on the platform to contact users to let them know you've moved
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.
Most bans are for really terrible communities, and yes, for a few of them, I think it went a bit too far, I wouldn't have banned the_donald for instance, despite not wanting to have anything to do with them. Really, they do the minimum acceptable for a mainstream service.
Only if you subscribe to the group think.
The truth is that reddit is one of the largest collection of bigots on planet earth.
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!"
this is like saying that stopping yourself from eating a donut is worth money to the state because the state pays for healthcare, and would otherwise have to put a cop in your kitchen, and cops make $x/hour, etc
'unpaid cyclists perform labor worth $100mm / year to citibike'
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/wikipedia-ho...
> "Perhaps the paid-PR scandal is a coming of age for Wikipedia in the era of SEO shills, and the public's increasing awareness about powerful corners of the Internet -- and how subject they can be to the interests of close-knit friends and business associates. In this light, a Web site as insanely valuable as Wikipedia will always attract gaming for promotion."
This is hardly just the moderators on Reddit, there's also the armies of upvote and downvote bots that can be deployed to push a story to the top or bury it, ditto with comments, and then there's things like the outright bans for anyone raising particularly controversial topics (bans for mentioning the Wuhan lab leak on Reddit is one of the more blatant ones, for example).
All in all, social media is not what anyone in their right mind would call a 'reliable unbiased information source'.
As a rule, all moderators suck. This has been true since before http.
Most moderators you notice suck. There are a lot of invisible moderators around quietly removing spam and keeping communities free of griefers.
EDIT: I'm sure some are paid to astroturf as well.
It seems fragile. If a few hundred people said f*it, would reddit collapse overnight?