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Yeah. You’d have to be an idiot to work for that guy for free at this point, unfortunately.
If only there were an alternative platform to Reddit that we could use instead.
I have no respect for Reddit mods
Just narcissistic idiots
Obviously that’s not about those who mod small subs
Controversial take, I don’t think mods need to be paid. You don’t have to be a mod, you’re actively choosing to be a moderator. If you aren’t getting paid for your work and dislike that, then don’t do it. There’s always going to be someone willing to do it for free, like a hobby.
I agree in principle, but its a really bad thing to encourage people to dedicate free time to a thankless job because the only people who will endure it are those with agendas, power trippers, sociopaths, or anyone else bored. In my own experiences and talking to others, mod fatigue takes over after some time.
Community websites are really bears the bigger they get.
In reality, reddit should have its own moderators on the payroll with its own moderation policy. They did this once before, but the person was of questionable background. Instead of trying to fix the policy, reddit just went back to the unpaid landed gentry.
Mods getting paid for their work does not fix the problems they have being unpaid as-is. That requires strict moderator policies, moderation logs, a proper appeal/arbitration process, and even then its not going to be 100% fair. There’s not a whole lot reddit can do at this point even if they went back to paid mods. Which they won’t, because they’re now in the tail end of the company’s lifecycle: Gut everything so the founders can exit, leave the suckers with their shit product.
You realize no one is getting paid on Lemmy right? Yeah maybe someone set up a patreon to cover some of their server costs, but that’s probably not even covering the full costs, let alone the time or takes to admin an instance
Mod fatigue because existing mods limit the number of people on the mod team to a size that makes them do too much work?
Eg. If a mod team only wants 5 individuals on the team and the community has 1000000 subscribers, then that’s on them.
I’m a believer that the size of a mod team should be proportional to the size of the community; modding should be as casual as submitting a post/comment.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people putting in effort to try to make life better for everyone, I just think the fatigue is self inflicted.
I also agree. But for a for-profit company like Reddit, there should be a threshold for certain subreddits that require mods to be paid.
That is, for a major/popular subreddit like pics the mods should be paid by Reddit.
For a minor subreddit like r/hotgirls whowanttohavesexwithgcanuck the mods can be unpaid.
Why are there minors on that subreddit 🧐 (kidding)
Not controversial in my books. They are choosing to be unpaid mods, don’t like it? Don’t do it.
I agree with you, and I think it’s a controversial take only in the activist spheres of western online intelligentsia, while frankly most of the world doesn’t think it’s a real problem in the grand scheme of things
Nope, disagree. I don’t think mods need to be payroll as full time staff, but I think the lack of compensation is what is contributing to reddit being shit.
Much like YouTube involves people who are willing to make content and drop it on YouTube for free, the truth is that most of the really high quality content would not be there if the creators couldn’t monetize their work, and that’s because their work costs time and money.
Reddit mods should be entitled to remuneration if the sub generates certain amounts of traffic and content, and then they should be entitled to a set percentage of advertising revenue generated from that sub.
Mods will be better, reddit will be better. Not great, because that asshat spez is still there, but better.
I mean, it wasn’t like I was expecting the guy who refused to take down a popular softcore CP sub until it got mainstream media attention to be morally upstanding.
During a recent Q&A video, Huffman argued that he was totally justified in paying himself more than the CEOs of Meta, Pinterest and Snap combined.
“If the company does well, I will do well,” he said. “If the company does not do well, I don’t either.”
Motherfucker is saying NOTHING. Generic ass, MEANINGLESS STATEMENT
I mean, what do you expect him to say? “Lol, get fucked”?
A little bit. He doesn’t strike me as the type to keep the quiet part quiet.
He’ll still get a golden parachute if the company goes to shit.
It’s also a lie. If the company does well, he gets richer. If the company does not do well, he’s still rich.
I think what he means is, his compensation is mostly tied to stocks and therefore stock performance.
No, he won’t be poor if it does badly but it would change his compensation in a huge way.
Edit: .2% (rounded up) of his compensation is just normal salary. The rest is stocks.
This is the norm for any big business. The top dogs will be wildly paid even if the company is struggling. They’ll get a big fat payday even if they get kicked out (golden parachute). Hell, even the bosses in the NYC Public Library system are pulling in close to a million bucks a year even as they talk about cutting services.
The NYC Library is a huge organization. They deserve that money.
Blame Mayor Adams for the budget. He paid millions for new radios for his police buddies. The old ones work fine, also… radios? That’s top priority?
The mods who stayed after the API desaster are lost.
That seems a little reductive. I’ve never moderated anything, but I bet if I spent years building up a community I would also find it hard to just walk away.
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Anyone who’s ever tried to get a friend group to change chat apps knows this isn’t simple.
I imagine doing it with a few thousand people is even more difficult.
I agree. That’s why me and all my friends are on Friendster.
You don’t have to imagine it. The official piracy subreddit did it.
I tried to get my friend group to move to Signal from FB messenger because I did not want that nasty shit on my phone anymore. They were not interested at all and acted like it was the most inconvenient thing in the world. I ended up uninstalling FB messenger anyway and only check it on my desktop and rarely respond now unless it is a one on one conversation or directed at me in a group chat. I told them if they want/need to get in touch with me right away to use old school SMS or actually call me.
The assumption here is that mods moving is enough.
The mods didn’t have to move the community, just move themselves and let nature sort things out.
This is the truth that it hurts. Then again, they are non techy folks and use what mainstream uses
I don’t see why you need to bring everyone over with you. Even just a hundred is more than enough for a community
Oh geeze, so much. “Hey just grab Signal real quick, it’s super simple and private and SMS seems to get worse as time goes on anyway. Plus I can send you better pictures and videos!”
“Lol meh why you tryin to sell it to me.”
It’s weird, the things people really dig in their heels on. They’ll download apps for the silliest thing but “another chat app” is such an inconvenience.
It’s the only reason I think reddit dot com still resolves at all anymore. If the users weren’t the product, to both the company and other users, better alternatives would be the norm by now.
You don’t have to walk away, you can migrate.
We tried that with Lemmy and many great communities only have one or two people posting consistently.
Most people don’t care about behind the scenes
It depends, if mods were fully onboard and had a plan it definitely works. Just look at Piracy or Star Trek communities.
I just checked the Star Trek community on reddit and it’s still up with 753k members and 189 online. The Lemmy versions I can find are a fraction of that.
The idea of Lemmy is great but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking big communities actually migrated.
Depends on what your standard is, to me a community on here having 100+ daily users is already a huge success. I don’t think people expect the whole subreddit to migrate, just enough to have roughly the same amount of content/interaction.
Then its not a migration, which is what we’re talking about.
If you’re happy leaving a group of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in some communities for a group of 100 that’s cool, but don’t spin it as a successful migration.
The rest of the world didn’t even realize we left.
And look at the ttrpg.network community for a counterexample, they still have a pinned post on the dndmemes subreddit advertising Lemmy and ttrpgmemes gets like .1% of the traffic dndmemes does. And this is still after a months-long rebellion complete with allowing NSFW and restricting submissions to a single user account, both things that would normally kill a subreddit dead.
It’s too early to see a face and get into a slapping mood.
Get fucked, u_spez
Since he took back over, Spez has been making reddit an objectively worse experience. Doesn’t deserve that pay.
FYI Spez is a pedophile piss-boy.
What’s the origin of the pedo accusation?
Edit: Is pedophile on the list of words we’re gonna make meaningless now?
Pedophile, Racist, Nazi, Fascist, The list grows daily
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Ohh I remember that. I also seem to remember you used to be able to make other people mods without confirmation back then? Maybe I’m misremembering.
This is correct. We should hate spez for being a skeevy ashole, but let’s not make up random accusations.
He was the moderator of a sub called “jailbait” for a long time. What’s less clear is if that was something he did on purpose or if someone else assigned him as a mod as a prank assuming he wouldn’t notice
I always wondered why a subreddit like that was allowed to exist in the first place. I guess I have my answer now.
He could have removed himself.
When someone invites you to become a moderator you have to click a couple times to accept. It was no accident.
The right is already working hard on that
I vote not helping in the effort.
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Yeah, the mods are the landed gentry
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How are mods landed gentry? I spent my time as a Reddit mod with Nazis trying to dox me and threaten me, before Reddit banned me for making fun of Nazis.
The moderator culture in America and probably abroad relies on unemployed people living in their relatives house who get paid nothing but lame perks here and there. That is the bulk of it.
Some people moderate 5+ chat rooms daily without pay.
They are digital slaves. Make no mistake about it. And they somehow have been conditioned to believe it will pay off when it rarely does.
Spez is a shitbag who never did anything but be in the same room with actual important people.
Nobody is forcing them to do it. If they are unhappy about it they should stop doing it. And preferably come to us not getting paid.
They are digital slaves. Make no mistake about it.
… we’re volunteers.
Some people do community clubs as a way to kill time with casual acquaintances. I have severe social anxiety so that’s not a desirable option. Some people do sports. I’m a cripple. Some people do church shit. I hate hymns and I don’t believe in God.
So I moderate. And post.
You both have good points. One interesting aspect is that this volunteer labor is actually contributing to what is making the product valuable in the first place.
You could volunteer to do QA for a software company, or volunteer to clean the floors at a bank, or volunteer to work on an assembly line… And we’d likely criticize those businesses for taking advantage of that labour if it were systemic and widespread.
On the other hand you have open source projects which are freely licensed for huge corporations to make tons of profit from, and all we expect is that they give something back (but we don’t even hold them to that).
It’s interesting to think about where moderation work sits among these.
The reward for the work is the result of the work. For these communities to exists, there must be moderation and for many people the existence of said communities is worth the cost in time/server costs. Reddit selling stock off the backs of people who perform free labor for them is a problem, but someone who sets up a lemmy/mastodon/whatever to host discussion about the things that they care about is not a slave just because they don’t demand monetary compensation or sell your data. The lack of monetization isn’t a bug it’s a feature.
Thank you for your service
o7
Don’t you dare compare Reddit mods to slaves. Slaves don’t have the option to quit work, mods are doing it by choice.
No, no… slavery, like knitting or moderating a small forum space, is obviously just a hobby, or at worst, a side hustle. It’s just a way to grow your personal brand, not the single worst atrocity across all of human history.
They get paid in moderator power trips. “What did you say? Banning…”
I think some of the mods are power tripping, but when I was a mod on one of the subs I think I only ever banned one person. If somebody else had been prepared to motivate the sub then I’d have been happy to let them do it, but it ended up me me doing it.
Lol slavery
Frankly outrageous comparison
The mods just have to find a new platform that appreciates them. That’s why I left reddit, I’m giving them free content and a bunch of Spez’s are getting rich off our work.
Then they have the audacity to take away what little we actually had, like the API access. Reddit sucks and the death spiral has begun.
As a final act they will get a bunch of redditors to buy in to their IPO only to see the prices come crashing down while they all hold the bags, and the hedgies get even more of our money. It’s a rigged game we cannot win.
Well we win by not paying into the IPO. If no one buys into it it won’t be worth very much and then they won’t have huge amounts of cash.
How much does he make? I don’t want to open the article
At the end of the day, the reddit mods had all the opportunities to once again, protest their working conditions and leave reddit today. But I see no evidence that an organized effort took place.
It’s unfair, and spez isn’t thinking any further than the moment he can sell his comp and move on. But they have all the stakes in this matter and nothing is happening. I know there are efforts on reddit’s part to squelch the moderators, but at some point they have to make clear this isn’t going to work the way it is.
But I see no evidence that an organized effort took place.
Reddit blackout protest clearly made us understand that if we do any sort of resistance against them they don’t think twice replacing the current mods with new ones even if that can affect the subreddit. At this point, they see Reddit as a cash cow and not a people’s forum. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be speaking here in lemmy.
That’s the same problem that workers in Victorian factories faced. We can call them “scabs”, but they’re people who aren’t conscious about their role in an economic scenario or they simply side with the employer out of habit, conditioning or alleged self-interest.
idt they are similar. idt mods should be paid. bringing monetary benefits might be nice but i think it will turn moderating as a means of income. people moderate subreddits out of their passion or that subreddit theme might be their hobby and making it monetary will be a disaster.
but i think it will turn moderating as a means of income
Only if they are paid enough to make it an income.
If they are paid, for example, an annual stipend which reflects their work but isn’t enough to make it a daily job, that would be a huge step in the right direction. You could even make it depend on the size of the subreddit since bigger ones take a lot more work than smaller ones… but never enough to actually live on.
I think a lot of moderators would be very happy to get a couple of thousand dollars a year for their work.
Spez could have swallowed his pride and like gig-economified (If that’s not a word yet, I stake my claim lmao) mods, could have probably gotten away with paying pennies on the dollar with the right scheme (ala Amazon turk). I could see the headlines now “Reddit making waves PAYING moderators”, “Make 500 bajilion Dollars JUST moderating for Reddit!” and people would have flocked to it lolol
The problem is that allowing mod discretion allows for marginalized people to participate in their own communities, and gig economy workers are, at best, only going to remove the most egregious harassment (I used to do something similar for another big social media site, it was an eye opening and horrifying experience - and I didn’t even see the “call the cops” level shit).
I think you’re right that the tech bros would love that move, though.
