Never ever would have seen myself reading a considered and data heavy post on r/hentai linked from an Ars Technica article. What a time we’re living in.
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Recent developments are just another indication of the power struggle happening between Reddit and its most dedicated users. Reddit needs free content and moderation to exist, yet it doesn’t want to give those critical players real control of site policies, even though they are largely responsible for much of the site’s content and value.
Finally an article that goes a little further in details about how important good mods are for reddit.
The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually, and as detailed on the r/hentai subreddit, the work mods do is both complex and extensive. Reddit itself calculated that manual mod removals represented 30.9 percent of content removed in 2022. Reddit would be a different website, one perhaps incapable of functioning, without the tens of thousands of volunteers it uses to keep content safe, enjoyable, relevant, and valuable. Relying on volunteers saves the unprofitable company plenty of money.
I thought this was pretty poignant too.
The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually
That seems an extremely conservative estimate to me. The linked article says:
The team recorded the work done to keep 126 subreddits moderated for an average of 142 days, and analysed automated logs generated whenever the 900 human moderators took an action.
In total, more than 800,000 actions were recorded. Some actions contained full timestamps of when work began and ended; others only contained a single timestamp – for removing a post, say – and so the time taken was estimated at what the researchers believe is a lower bound.
The median amount of time any individual spent working daily is 10 seconds, but the top 10 per cent of moderators spent between 3 and 40 minutes working for Reddit. Two in every three actions were taken by the top 10 per cent of moderators.
There’s a major problem with this methodology, which is the assumption that a moderator is not working unless they’re taking an action. But that’s not the case, is it? Sitting around keeping an eye on things and not doing anything because no action is currently required is still work! Just like a security guard. You pay them for all of the 8 hours they spend watching your stuff every day, not just for the thirty seconds a month spent actually apprehending thieves.
According to this Reddit post, there were over 70K moderators on Reddit six years ago. Even if they were only paid the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and each of them on average only spent fifteen minutes a day keeping an eye on things, it would still cost Reddit almost fifty million dollars annually. And that’s based on a number that’s six years old, which is certain to have grown a lot since then.
So yeah, Reddit is benefiting from free labor a lot.
Its actually quite disgusting - monetising on top of people doing voluntary work with zero pay.
Them saying that they didn’t remove mods because of the protest is ridiculous. I’ve spent time on enough subreddits where the mods weren’t “active and engaged” and seemingly absent. But now this is suddenly one of the most important rules the admins are deciding to enforce. I wonder how many mods have been removed for not being “active and engaged” from subreddits that didn’t participate in the protest, because I certainly haven’t heard of any as of yet
Some on Reddit are celebrating this because “mods bad”
Meanwhile, I’m a Redditor for 10 years and haven’t been banned once, nor have any bad interactions with mods. The first thing I follow rules and second I barely interacted with mods in the first place because I’m not an asshole. I don’t QQ because they removed my low effort meme or hate speech or whatever.
Simple as.
It’s also interesting the sentiment on non-Reddit platforms are more pro-user than pro-spez.
That’s a laughably low amount. If it were that cheap, reddit would throw out all unpaid mods and do it themselves. That’s less than 1% of their revenue, and they would have total control over their site, that would be a bargain. That would be 200 minimum wage workers full time. I’m pretty sure 200 fulltime workers is waaaaaaaayyyyyy too few to moderate ALL of reddit… (and this is just looking at time investment, never mind experts in their field moderating subreddits about very specific topics.)
Reddit boasts about 400.000.000 users, so with 200 mods, that would be… 1 (minimum wage) mod per 2 million users… Yeahhh… that’s gonna work XD
I’ve seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it’s accurate, Reddit should just… do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They’d be stupid not to.
And honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.
You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it’s your productivity that will suffer, no one else’s. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you’re not being huge hypocrites and pretending it’s community-run.
The problem is that Reddit can’t actually do that. Because the cost (as others have pointed out) would be way higher even at minimum wage. Reddit is completely reliant on free labour. It would have gone under a long time ago without it. Given the leadership’s hostility towards the people that create the content and help maintain that content, Reddit going under is overdue and the platform is now past it’s use by.
