HN Explorer

Ask HN: How should we compensate forum moderators?

2 points by viksit ↗ HN
Given what’s happening at Reddit - there are a lot of ideas in different comments across hn.

I wrote this last week - thinking about some technological solutions. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272935)

Trying to get a sense of how the community thinks about it from a product or policy perspective.

How should we think about this?

14 comments

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nailer
It’s more difficult than you would think.

Naive answer is a percentage of monthly advertising or subscription revenue, split amongst the moderators based on the proportion of the moderation work they have undertaken.

However, this creates a perverse incentive for moderators to perform unnecessary additional moderation work to bring in more compensation.

neovialogistics
A quick look to see if there are relevant publications brings up the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, but there are probably others. I would prefer to look at academic handlings of industry pay to anecdotes and I presume others here would as well.
viksit
interesting - who would you compare against?
hitsurume
I wasn't aware that modwerators were compensated. I thought it was a service they provided to their communities.
viksit
right, but according to stats - they do $3.4m worth of work every year - effectively subsidizing reddit.

if they had a way to truly own their community and for the community to show their appreciation - it would def make them feel more valued.

no one will reject “donations” of course.

wondered how crowd sourcing a side income would look like - similar to the creator economy.

eg: ad revenue made on a subreddit - split with mods.

hitsurume
Are your questions meant to be a brainstorming on how an ideal site compensates Moderators or something else? A site like Reddit is depended on users visiting and generating content (discussions). Moderators are just middlemen that facilitate those discussions. a site like Reddit probably doesn't value the idea of moderators very much because anyone can become a moderator. Moderators aren't influencers, so they don't move communities. The value of a community are of the people that participate in that space and the biggest draw of reddit is that its easy to participate in multiple communities at the same time.
viksit
this! a brainstorming session on this. on my previous post - lot of people had great ideas and i figured we’d get some more here.
hitsurume
What are we brain storming though? How to build a platform / site to pay moderators? But even before that, why would a regular user go to that site in the first place vs somewhere like Reddit/Facebook Groups/where-ever?
toast0
$3.4m of work divided by how many moderators = probably insulting to pay them would be my guess. Sure, the work and value isn't equally distributed.

Send thank you cards, annual gifts, maybe some sort of exclusive-ish discount program (a lot of corporations get employee discounts to large advertisers, maybe you could extend that to moderators at some minimum level of effort)

Maybe some token stock grants, if you can find a way to make that not a giant hassle.

eimrine
Two plates of rice daily, catwoman wife and tax discount!
yarrowy
There's no need to compensate them when there's plenty of volunteers willing to do the work for free.

Also Reddit itself has a built in moderating system with the upvote/downvote system and the "new" section.

Mods highly overrate their contribution to reddit. The truth is the site will run fine whether they stay or get replaced and the mods know this.

logicalmonster
I think it should be said that Reddit moderators might not be paid in money by Reddit, but they get a probably substantial amount of compensation in a different form of power/influence/opportunities.

Imagine if you're the moderator of a subreddit like /r/politics. You might not get a steady corporate paycheck, but you effectively get global political influence and power and probably more than a dozen serious offers by corporations, politicians, and likely even nation-states to not block/ban their spam of products/services/propaganda on that subreddit daily.