But most places can't afford professional moderation
When you see Reddit employees driving around in their own Teslas, the "can't afford" point seems quite moot. (not that I'm bitter—I'm happy for you—but I'm less happy for me as a result. Brains are awful.)
The weird Reddit dynamic is volunteers have full control and the volunteers aren't courted by the site very much. All moderators of subreddits with more than X thousand subscribers should have monthly conference calls with the core Reddit moderation team to keep everybody on the same page, to address issues before they arise, and to give the moderators more of a feeling of being part of the whole. Also, pay them various amounts from token thanks payments to some multiplier of minimum wage (based on size of community? size of active community? size of active community over the past 30 days? can't make it too gamifyable).
Most of the reason Reddit works at all is because of the huge number of volunteers doing moderation because they're passionate about their sub. If Reddit had to pay for moderators they would be bankrupt in a very short time. And even if it did replace mods with its own people (whether paid or not) the quality of the sub will drop.
Apologies, I likely clicked the wrong comment to reply. I agree with you, it's impossible for Reddit to provide that missing functionality. The moderation teams on some popular subreddits are almost the size of the entire paid Reddit admin staff. There is simply no way Reddit can take over the free moderation duties currently undertaken by volunteers.
The problem that every social media has is that manual moderation does not scale; even with tooling, the major platforms like Facebook employ thousands of content moderators as contractors, a lot in low-wage countries.
Having an army of willing volunteers helps, but it's not good enough because these are unpaid, untrained people without the psychological helplines that professional moderators have. I hope Reddit has good tooling to prevent the volunteers from seeing the worst of it.
That said, I do think that everyone contributing their time to social media like this should get a cut from the revenue; I'm 100% confident Reddit has exact numbers for the value per subreddit and even per post, so they can apply math and give the moderators a percentage of that, and even the posters of good posts.
I mean yeah then you get the problem of reposts and simple copiers, but that's already an issue, it's just that the issue is karma instead of money.
Replacing these volunteer moderators with paid moderators is obviously not in the cards, which can only mean Reddit wants to replace these volunteer moderators with other volunteer moderators. Assuming anyone volunteers in the first place.
Given that moderation is a thankless (and, in this case, unpaid) job, do you really think that many people with good intentions are stepping forward to take on that responsibility? Or is Reddit accidentally gonna recruit a bunch of trolls who turn r/apple into a hentai and piracy forum?
I think default subreddit moderators should be reddit employees (at least the highest ones), the current model doesn't quite work in my opinion. But that probably costs too much.
I like your point, but I go back and forth on this. Rules are different for non-profits and volunteers, so let's make sure we're focusing on a for-profit function hall, not a local community center.
As far as I can tell, Reddit exerts minimal control over its moderators, and seems to treat them like normal users who happened to get more buttons to press (perhaps by design for this very issue). That seems to me like they're not unpaid employees.
At the same time, I'm reasonably certain that if the moderators of, say the "aww" subreddit, decided as a whole that they were only going to use their moderator powers 5 times a day each, Reddit would step in.
And that brings me back around the other way. Reddit relies on its moderators, for sure.
But is the lack of control they exert over mods the true status quo? Or is the lack of control just because it's convenient?
If I'm running debate club at the function hall and it gets wildly popular, the biggest scene around. I'm sure the owners would be thrilled. If I then decide that anyone who says "um" more once is no longer welcome, I imagine the popularity would wane. The hall might be really cranky about lost concessions. They might try to find someone else to run their own debate club and counter-program mine. They might even cancel my lease and get a new debate club going in the same room. But they're not going to step in and replace me as the moderator of my own debate club.
This isn’t a reasonable critique of the unpaid moderation model — the same model we’ve had since long before Reddit.
Reddit has had several notable high quality subreddits entirely because of user moderation, and is able to host niche interest communities.
I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies. These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
I mod a large-ish subreddit and I disagree with moderators "gaining full ownership of their communities". Not every mod was around since the very beginning or did most of these mods spend considerable effort marketing their communities like one would do in an actual company. Even for communities with a clear theme and set of behavioural rules (e.g. r/CMV), a lot of that is enforceable via AutoMod. Most of what moderators do are barely more than Internet janitors.
A volunteer position is voluntary. There is no contract or minimum time commitment (though some subs have minimum mod action requirements). If a moderator no longer likes to commit their time, they can either go on a hiatus or leave.
Monetizing individual Reddit communities or paying moderators will create a whole plethora of financial and ethical issues which Reddit HQ is obviously unwilling to address at the moment. I'm pretty sure they've thought about this and decided keeping the status quo is the best choice for the time being.
I really wish reddit would begin to pay small amounts to its moderators. I feel like it would be a basic income experiment and kinda neat since the mods do most of the content and user moderation for reddit and spend thousands upon thousands of hours there.
At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage a high-profile subreddit than deal with the unpredictability of volunteer moderators. That’s ultimately where this is heading.
When you see Reddit employees driving around in their own Teslas, the "can't afford" point seems quite moot. (not that I'm bitter—I'm happy for you—but I'm less happy for me as a result. Brains are awful.)
The weird Reddit dynamic is volunteers have full control and the volunteers aren't courted by the site very much. All moderators of subreddits with more than X thousand subscribers should have monthly conference calls with the core Reddit moderation team to keep everybody on the same page, to address issues before they arise, and to give the moderators more of a feeling of being part of the whole. Also, pay them various amounts from token thanks payments to some multiplier of minimum wage (based on size of community? size of active community? size of active community over the past 30 days? can't make it too gamifyable).
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