i disagree. it is that simple. the community consists of the people that contribute to the discussion. the fact that this community is using reddit as their tool to communicate is secondary. if they as a group were unhappy with how things are done they could move. stackexchange, discord, whatever.
moderators should be volunteers from that community either way, not paid outsiders.
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 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.
It's arguable that the moderators of a given subreddit constitute the community of that subreddit. A group of 5 people regularly interacting around a common purpose is a community. A group of 200,000 people occasionally clicking arrows is not.
For what it's worth I think that's way more exciting than being in charge. I was recently involved (not as a moderator) in a community that burned itself to the ground due almost entirely to poor communication and lack of discussion between the moderators and the members themselves. This lead directly from, I think, the moderators having exactly the opinion you criticize - they viewed themselves as leading and ruling the users rather than supporting them. I've been thinking a lot about how that could have been prevented. Maybe the community could have survived if the system was structured in a way that gave users themselves enough power to hold moderators to account. Or maybe there's some other way the issues could have been mitigated.
That's exactly why people who collect stamps should care. The community I mentioned is gone specifically because the very invested members couldn't do anything about the self-destruction. And we knew we were powerless as it was all falling apart. At this point many would be happy to move to a new platform simply if it provided some type of guarantees against a repeat. (Which I think could be accomplished by giving the moderators less power without compromising their ability to moderate. Somehow.)
As to your final point about joining and contributing, I've done that. I'm here asking about the general guidelines because there are people here who have walked the path of fostering a community, or know people who have.
On the one hand, if a subreddit is supposed to be a community it doesn't make sense for there to be a class of user, a "mod", of a multi-thousand user community that can't be dislodged even if literally every other member of that community wants them to be. That is clearly a highly artificial structure imposed on a community by rigid computer code.
Let me acknowledge the obviously self-serving nature of this declaration, wrapped up in Truth, Justice and the American Way at a highly convenient time for Reddit, and dismiss it for the remainder of my post here, because I find social network game theory interesting as a hobby and want to discuss the mechanics and implications of having dislodgeable moderators.
The problem I see is that there is no way to build this structure that isn't gameable in a world where everyone uses free emails and has ever-increasing access to an army of LLM and other sorts of bots. You can't build a system where a single person with a bee in their bonnet about some mod can simply marshal an army of bots to get them dislodged. The entire thing about moderation is that it produces a stream of people with bees in their bonnet, and the people who tend to get moderated are disproportionally those people. The bigger the sub, the larger the stream of such people. The nice guy who can't be bothered to start a vendetta probably wasn't a problem poster in the first place.
You can't just "vote" them out by handing everyone in the world a vote. You can't hand a vote to everyone subscribed in the community. You could set a cutoff date but that is weird too. You could give participation points (voting, commenting) but those are easy to game too.
There really isn't a way to define a "community" in a way that code can get a hold of it. Which means that in the end this is just going to be Reddit imposing its central views by fiat. That is not intrinsically morally wrong. The problem is that it's not Reddit today. I expect Reddit is calculating the result of its moves with a simple multiplication of how much money they expect to make on the same community, but if they manage to contract it significantly in the process the calculations won't hold. Moreover, even if they do lever open every single community tomorrow, the damage won't be visible tomorrow. It'll be slowly over the course of the next year or two. There won't be a day where anyone external will be able to point at and say "Look, this proves we were right!". There won't be a day when I'd be able to counter a "Citation?" with objective proof. Reddit will just... fade. One interaction at a time.
Their claim that reddit got it right by using community/volunteer moderation really doesn't take into account the fact that the moderators in some communities are actually employees of some interest group who want to influence things.
The moderators of some of the political subs work for certain parties or political groups and it is blatantly obvious.
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).
Who moderates the moderators has always been an issue.
Still, there is no way around it. If that community has toxic mods, you probably don't want to stick around there anyway : go to a different one or make a new one yourself ! This is still better than being in a situation where there are only giant platforms like Facebook/Reddit/Discord/Xitter and no hope of starting a community outside their walls.
Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble.
Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.
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.
I don't disagree with you, but this does seem like a pretty obvious move for Reddit.
I don't think Reddit cares about appeasing moderators. Though with or without this move it will be very interesting to see what will happen to Reddit if there is a mass exodus of moderators. Moderation is IMO the hardest problem in social media, all other platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are objectively terrible at it. Reddit on the other hand with moderation at the micro level vs macro level seems to work. But its 100% on the backs of charitable time from unpaid users. If that falls apart, I can see it having a devastating effect on Reddit as a whole.
I think your entire set of assumptions about people 'donating' time, that there is an assignable dollar value, making analogies to employees, etc is deeply flawed.
This is a very straightforward exchange - moderators spend time moderating in return for the endorphins and jollies this activity brings them. By 'leave' I mean 'stop moderating'. At any time, any moderator can stop moderating at the loss of nothing more than the endorphins and the gain of extra free time to devote to some other hobby. There is a glut of people who would take up their spot. For nothing. That's where the heavy competition is - lots and lots of people enjoy doing this sort of thing, for whatever reasons. It's not like there is a shortage of internet message boards and in most of them, calls for volunteer mod positions are flooded with applicants.
Reddit is not benefiting from the inexplicable altruism of some sort of rare and highly valuable specialists. And for all their talk, the mods know this too because they did not even threaten with a walk-out, let alone attempt one. Their only leverage was to force their users into this spat with the admins.
I want to be a part of it for the community. Moderators are the (un)necessary evil.
The fact that you seem to see moderators as "owners" of a subreddit doesn't really help the case.
True, but there should be a way to control the moderators as well. The Reddit admins are pretty useless. Redditors and especially, Reddit moderator are not known for tolerating even a slightest difference in opinion.
I've been a redditor from the beginning, and have always agreed with the sentiment that communities should reflect their userbase.
The issue comes when in the case of /r/politics moderators do something outside what the majority sentiment is. Change comes slow, it's far easier to get a mod removed than it is to get 3 million subscribers to move to a new subreddit with a "better" moderator team.
moderators should be volunteers from that community either way, not paid outsiders.
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