32
votes
The work of online volunteers - Moderators’ work on Reddit and Facebook is crucial but not paid. We should be creative in how we compensate them.
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- Title
- The Work of Online Volunteers (Published 2022)
- Published
- Jun 28 2022
- Word count
- 1071 words
The quality of reddit has definitely detoriated over the past few months. Why would anyone want to work for free for reddit when they obviously don't care about any of the concerns of moderators. They didn't intervene into subreddits at all, allowed misinformation, racism, and terrorism to flourish, but as soon as moderators said "hey, you can't take away the tools necessary to run the subreddits we made" then reddit decided that it had a problem on its hands.
I've had two decade+ old accounts wrongfully banned over the since August. Not a single appeal was answered, no explanation, no replies.
Its like watching one of your childhood friends get into drugs and ruin their life while also stealing your stuff. Oh well, time to find better uses of my time.
I've branched out into using multiple content aggregation sites, especially since Reddit's debacles six months ago. Some of Reffit's users still seem to have a chip on their shoulder about the whole thing. New user growth on Reddit has potentially offset some of the blowback they received, but in the case that Reddit decides to burn goodwill again, I get the sense there's now competition users can flee to. Their market position feels weaker and moat smaller in that regard.
I also ended up on Reddit over a decade ago, in my case as an alternative to other communities that disintegrated. I think my view of Reddit is slightly less romantic: businesses and communities don't necessarily last forever, even if they have a big presence in our lives at the moment.
Administrating communities is hard work and if Reddit can't figure out how to make things more equitable for moderators and users, hopefully one of the newcomers can. Personally, I like the idea the idea of "donating" my contributions to more open spaces like the Fediverse. Or, I at least want to share the love a little more, rather than creating content for a single "rich internet company."
Reddit, to me, feels like Walmart. We used to have all these different niche forums where we could discuss different things. They were isolated, and managed by the community they supported.
Then, reddit came along, and consolidated the conversation. Now, you could easily cross forum lines without creating new accounts or starting full websites to discuss your niche hobby. Or was great for a while. You could build whatever community you wanted without a ton of infrastructure.
But something changed. The small forums where people could congregate lost their place, and eventually shut down. Then, reddit saw dollar signs in their eyes, and decided to piss off a vast majority of their content creators. I get why they killed 3rd party apps, but the way they went about it was pretty much as bad as it could have been.
My biggest problem with the whole thing is that the communities that we created from the ground up were taken away from us without any input or thought. If reddit wanted to remove subreddit creators from the site, fine, but they should have also reset the subreddit to a brand new one, wiped all CSS, flairs, automod code, subscribers, etc.
I joined Tildes years ago when it was announced, and I've enjoyed it over the past few days, it has an early reddit feel. I haven't quite figured out Lemmy yet though. For people who grew up on the internet, the death of reddit, or at least my exodus from reddit, is sad to me. I can see why you don't feel the same way. Other online sites don't have the community, or the moderation, that reddit did. Reading Instagram, TikTok, ir Facebook comments is painful.
Because they have an agenda or product to sell. The presentation of news I've seen on r/worldnews, the graphs that have been coming up on r/dataisbeautiful, and the suggestions/comments on even r/MTB have all felt like their is a considerable slant. I no longer trust that articles are at the top because they are viewed as the most important by the community or that the comments within reflect the thoughts of real people. I remember 10 years ago when the video about manipulating reddit's system came out or the Undian scandal. The only change is that these folks are even more enabled by the admins at Facebook and Reddit.
One thing that really disillusioned me was noticing the unchecked proliferation of repost bots, which has only gotten worse since the most powerful API tools were disabled and the main anti-bot project shut down in protest. A significant fraction of top posts in big subreddits are carbon copies of popular posts from years past -- including copies of the top comments from those posts. Most of them are users trying to farm karma in order to resell their accounts to spammers, some are preparing networks of fake accounts for various advertising and political influence operations, a few are even ChatGPT bots that pepper the site with weirdly paraphrased reposts and incredibly saccharine comments. And because Reddit lets you keep karma for deleted posts, they all had an incentive to nuke their own content after a day or two, littering the site with broken links. Plus, regardless of the motives, seeing the same recycled content over and over gets old quick.
Any unfortunate consequence of kicking out the good mods. People who wanted to control the narrative were licking their chops as soon as reddit said they'd start removing entire mod teams.
Users cheered the possibility of getting rid of "power mods" without understanding that power mods were going to be the ones who would take over those subreddits.
For sure. I wasn't the most active mod overall but I'd spend time each week straightening out problems in r/ tipofmytongue (usually people not crediting solvers or deleting their answered questions, which require API access and custom mod tools). Back in 2020 I put a lot of thankless work into turning around a political comedy sub that had been hijacked by a toxic mod, censoring users and manipulating votes with multiple puppet accounts to push an anti-Dem narrative. Started a few small subs myself. And right before the API debacle I was in the process of revamping a different Q+A sub that had been abandoned by another toxic mod that had gone on a weird power trip, mass banning users for asking him questions or breaking obscure rules.
Dropped it all cold turkey. I've barely touched the site in months and am definitely not contributing any content or labor (even labor of love) as long as it's ultimately benefiting people who hold that work in contempt and see it as something to destructively leverage into a big IPO payout. I might have been content with some authentic contrition from site leadership, acknowledgement of damage done, and steps taken to undo some of the damage and prevent it from happening again, but the recent "mod world" event in which the CEO doubled down on criticism of protestors and refused to apologize to the community for anything made it clear that's never going to happen. If that means ceding the site to power-tripping assholes who don't really care about helping people, that's their loss, and I hope the noticeable dive in content quality kills their IPO push stone dead.
I disagreed with the headline of the article so I just had to read it to find out if I was being too dismissive... Then I read that. As someone who's dealt with having a direct line to Meta, I'll take the money. They're giving Meta too much credit.
So, back to my original thought. People are drawn to moderation because it's a form of holding a community together. Just like knowing all your neighbors on the street and being there for them, knowing the people in your group, forum, or guild is a community. Yeah, you might not know them in person but they're people. So, on one hand, having a functioning community IS the compensation. The problems appear because unlike the houses on your street, the forum can grow infinitely (to a degree) and that's more than any one person can manage. So it becomes a lot of work but people do it because they have that sense of community.
But, like, content moderators at these parasocial networks need to be compensated, and I mean monetarily, because their communities are why people want to be there. The idea of paying them in some sort of company scrip or another just further obfuscates their value. To side a little further back up in the article
I don't trust online communities where I see that one moderator is on more subreddits than a human could possibly manage. Where mods can be added and removed silently and at random. Yeah, I am distrustful of someone being paid by the company to manage discussions but in the case of publicly owned companies where their constant push for growth and algorithms feed trolls - it's a full time job. I know that the people just want somewhere to belong that they can get to virtually hang out with like minded individuals but they're exploited for profit of the company. In the Western capitalist world, where almost everything is solved in terms of money, why the fuck would fast pass for their help desk be an incentive?
That’s not a very well researched article. The real reason moderators can’t be paid is because then Reddit would be totally liable for the content it hosts. As long as it’s user generated and user moderated, they aren’t liable for illegal content that ends up there. If they hire the moderators they become liable; that would be ultimately far more expensive.
It also doesn’t touch on at all why moderators do what they do for free. It’s rewarding to build a community, and it’s much better to be in a nice community than one that isn’t well moderated. I’m sure that’s obvious for everyone here on Tildes, but it isn’t to many online users and would have been useful to include in the article.
The proposed ways of compensating moderators are fair, though. I will say since July Reddit has implemented many new moderation features which work well, including finally making it possible to moderate on the app (which admittedly I don’t use). I’m still primarily moderating with third party tools on old reddit, but if I do need to check in on my phone or tablet, I can accomplish simple tasks which is nice.
That’s not how 230 works. TechDirt has a pretty decent explanation, specifically the “Because of Section 230, websites have no incentive to moderate!” section:
This doesn’t apply to content prohibited by other laws, e.g., copyright claims, but Reddit is already responsible for responding to (e.g.,) a DMCA takedown requests.
I'm not going to touch on legality of employed moderators opening new lines of liability. That's secondary to my concern. So too is the fact that for any forum of serious scale (like Reddit, with (thousands? tens of thousands?) of posts every minute) the wage cost would be considerable and likely turn the enterprise into something unfeasible.
However, I feel it's important to note I don't give two shits about Reddit, or the fiscal bottom line of any corporate concern trying to leverage a forum for commercial reasons. Fuck them, to be very clear.
My concern is what changes when you start paying moderators. When the position is paid. When money's on the line.
I was dabbling with Youtube at the very beginning. Not as an uploader; as a viewer. Back when a minute of video took ten or more minutes to load so you could watch it. People, especially a lot of the younger generations that just always had the Youtube that kind of looks and acts like it does now, I don't get the sense they really know what Youtube originally was. Why it's called "Youtube."
If you had a passion for something, you could put it on the tubes. The interwebz. Video was a weird thing online back then. No one really knew how to make it work. We take the existence of Youtube (and Facebook and other major social media platforms) for granted now, but consider something like movie trailers.
Now, you just click click and watch the trailer. Making it available online is part of the marketing strategy. Back then, even for something that was a sensation like Star Wars Phantom Menace, finding the trailer online was quite hard. I remember needing to get a paid copy of an Adobe player just to view the trailer file I'd found. A little sub-480p copy of the trailer, but at least I could watch it over and over (and did).
Youtube had a lot of clips from movies and stuff, sure. But there were a lot of people with passion for the things they uploaded. Collectors, craftspeople, those kinds of folks. Something they were really into, and also happened to have a camera and the technical resources to convert it over to digital and upload it to Youtube.
Then Youtube started paying. They said "hey, we'll cut you in on the revenue." And dollar signs lit up all over the world.
Why is that bad? Because now you have to really, really, really look to find someone with a passion for whatever they're uploading. Someone who's into it, who loves it, who is into that thing (that subject, that item, that whatever) so much they just had to share. Honest passion. True interest. Not casual, not feigned, not manufactured.
What you find 99% of the time now, since the money started, is people wanting to cash in. They want the cash, just the cash, only the cash. Gimmie the money. And now, of course, there are whole enterprises built upon Youtube. Industries dedicated to editing and filming and organizing and preparing videos. People who tap into all that and rely on personality and polish instead of passion.
I hate the term "creator" because there's so often no passion in it; just a desire to get paid. They're not creating anything, they just want the clicks. And it shows in their attitudes, in their approaches, in how they chase the algorithm, how they look for the lowest common denominator of what's necessary, in how they seize on shocking click-bait topics and tactics
Take "make" videos. I like watching people make things. Sometimes crafts, sometimes buildings. I don't want personality, I don't want TV drama, I don't want them to vlog about what they're gonna do and what their plans are. Just make the thing so I can watch the thing being made. It's soothing, and interesting. Often I learn things.
You have to dig to get past all the "make creators" who rely on almost anything except actually making something. So many of them fill their "make" videos with vlogging, with testimonial, with personality and conversations with their friends who are there for the "make video". They take something like cutting a board or welding a seam and splice into a multi quick-cut montage, overlaid with pulsing music, intermixed with slo-mo ... what the fuck!!!!
But that shit dominates the algorithms. And it wouldn't exist if there wasn't money they could grab. They'd be hustling somewhere else, and I wouldn't have to dig quite so hard to find bookmarks for honest, passionate makers who just have a nice camera, know how to point it at the work, and who just do the thing so I can see the thing.
No, those folks are buried beneath all the HEY GUYS WELCOME TO MY CHANNEL DON'T FORGET TO LIKE-COMMENT-SUBSCRIBE. TODAY WE'RE LOOKING AT MAKING A BOOKCASE. WE WON'T MAKE THE BOOKCASE, BUT WE'LL TAKE TWELVE MINUTES TO TALK ABOUT WHY WE WANTED THE BOOKCASE BECAUSE ALL THESE THINGS THAT THAT AREN'T BOOKS NEED A SHELF SO WE'RE GOING TO THINK ABOUT GOING TO THE STORE BUT WOW LUMBER IS EXPENSIVE AND ....
Shut, the fuck, up. Seriously.
It does help, a little, that most of the ones who are useless make it obvious; with stupid React style thumbnails and so on. But they still flood the site, clogging up the searches. And it's worse now that Google is trying to outlaw adblock, and I'm browing incognito so I can't use my history (with views and blocks) to try and nudge what I'm looking for up.
Youtube is never going back to what it was. It's too far gone now. There would probably be a full on global riot if Google decided to stop revenue sharing videos. I really do think it might get that far, because too many people think it's their right to upload complete trash (flashy polished trash) and get paid on the other end of it.
Reddit and any other major forum ... I shudder to think of the brutal land rush that would happen if they started offering paid positions. Especially if it wasn't as a formal employee, where you have an actual job and go into the office and get assigned a queue of messages to examine and act upon.
If it's Reddit style, where someone can just sign up to "moderate" and get money (or money value) just for doing it. The water wouldn't be water; it'd be pure blood, so many people would be backstabbing each other to get those positions. The major top subreddits, the front page ones ... it'd probably be a constant revolving door as people eager to step up tried to get the ones already in the slots banned or demoted.
I've seen what happens to a forum with "bad mods." Where they have off-topic agendas, chips on their shoulders, or otherwise want to keep their thumbs on the scales. I've seen it in little forums with a couple of dozen actives, and I've seen it with forums that have a lot of daily traffic. The attitude and effort of the mods does shape the community, and bad ones easily turn it into something horrible.
I prefer to stick with the devil I know, versus one I've already met in other areas and would like to not invite into these ones. Youtube is a gimmie, gimmie, gimmie go-zone of people determined to cash in. Forums can still be a nice resource, where you can find people who might have some passion for the subject, whatever that subject is. Maybe it's movies, maybe it's sixteenth century wood carving techniques.
I don't want "gimmie the cash" personalities invading the forums, large or small. And if actual money value is on the line, that's what'll happen. It's inevitable. Reddit's already turned pretty darned corporate, and the userbase is so big the discourse well past "hive mind" mentality as it is. But there are still little areas that are useful, even today. Those will wash away if "creator mindeset" comes to the moderator role.
I want the forums I connect with to be driven by people truly, honestly interested in the thing the forum's about. In my experience, that's the best chance of getting good interesting traffic. To build a community around the thing, rather than it blowing up into something unconnected with the subject. Paying moderators turns it into something with cash value, and that rarely stays grounded.
Your post has a lot of good talking points, but I found it interesting to zoom in a bit here. Because it seems like as amazing as the internet is, we don't really seem to be able to run such social services at a massive scale like that. Youtube is getting thousands of hours uploaded every minute, and I don't how many millions of posts and comments that run through Meta or Reddit every day, but it is really not possible to make any meaningful human administrated moderation at that scale.
Before these mega sites gave basically everyone in the world the ability to publish "stuff" globally, creative output was usually gatekept by the likes of editors at publishing firms, newspapers or tv stations. I don't think we want to go back to that because Youtube have also allowed for a ton of creative people to make something that wouldn't have found its way to a regular tv station, but it is clear we need some sort of curation to filter through all the noise. Understandably the big tech sites uses algorithms to do this, but as you also say, it just pushes a certain type of "content" to the top.
I think people deserves to be paid for their work and you can't eat and pay rent with passion alone, but it does seem that bad things start to happen when really big money starts to be involved. The worst Youtube channels tend to be the really really big ones - and of course all the ones that tries to be the next big one. Same goes for the bigger subreddits.
I don't know what any solution is, but it does seem to me that things break down in all kinds of ways when the scale simply gets too big to handle. The general concept behind Facebook, Reddit and Youtube are fantastic and have brought lots of good things to the world, but everyone of them turned into a horrible mess once they got too big.
A lot of good stuff in your comment here. What you’re describing is essentially a form of “crowding out” where applying extrinsic rewards paradoxically diminishes intrinsic motivation.
I feel like there's an easy solution to this. Stop volunteering for for-profit corporations, and they'll be forced to pay for the labor that they're currently getting for free.
Reddit showed that they couldn't care less about their moderators, especially when they had a vision that differed from the money grubbing one their CEO had. Kick us to the curb and try to find the next group of starry-eyed terminally online losers to make them money.
Social Media is fully gamified today, folks don't volunteer for moderation, rather they're pulled or sucked into that place like honey bees. If they don't do it, someone else will. The netizens are growing in size each passing day which makes this crowdsourcing only too much easier.
The "creative" solution I see is to just pay people to be moderators it's crucial work and volunteer work for a for profit company that can and should afford to pay people to do this job. It's not easy, nor is it fun.
It seems that if you create a community, moderate and grow it and the site you are doing that on makes money on it, you should see a fair portion of that.
If I make a YouTube video and it performs well for YouTube, then I earn a commission. That sort of leads into “well if I make a bunch of posts on reddit and they perform well for the site should I also get paid?”
It does raise concerns if a platform is entirely ad supported. I know people mocked Reddit gold and how worthless it was, but what other revenue non-ad supported revenue streams do you see for a website that provides free content?
Offtopic, but I added the lede to the title to provide a bit more context... since the headline on its own was a bit ambiguous, IMO.
Archived.