Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators? | Hacker News Reader

Is Stack Exchange in violation of NY labor law by using volunteer moderators?

meta.stackexchange.com

250 pointsgortok149 comments

Why just moderating? In a sense, it's every action you do that adds value to the site by drawing people in or improving their experience.

When users write a comment (such as what I'm writing right now on Hacker News), they are acting as writers who generate text for people to read. When they submit a link, they are locating content for people to read. When they upvote or downvote, they are acting somewhat like editors by helping to curate content.

In traditional media (a newspaper, for example), these functions would typically be performed by paid staff. In social media, it doesn't work that way.

But then the whole point of social media is to interact with other people. And interaction is two-way. You could argue that the value users receive from interacting is the reason they come to the site. And consuming content is part of that value, but you could also argue that being heard is part of the value you receive as a user.

When I do any of any of these things, am I doing labor by giving up my valuable time in service of the business? Or am I receiving value because the site allows me to be heard? Maybe the answer is both. Probably we should look at every aspect of the transaction.

Continuing the newspaper comparison, look at letters to the editor. Does anyone argue that people who write letters to the editor are unpaid volunteers? Not that I know of, because everyone understands that people write those letters because they want their opinion to be heard. So even in traditional media there's a little precedent for this.

It's not about unpaid work though, it's employee-like unpaid work. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/337123/345240 has some interesting discussion of this.

In practice, that means that normal commenters or people using social media aren't relevant for two reasons:

* There's minimal control over their actions from the 'employer'. There's some basic rules on what content is not allowed, but nobody says "you must write a question about Java every day". You can use the tools available however you'd like, and you have freedom over when and how you use SO/social media - there's no obligation to post with any specific frequency. That's not true for moderators: they have specific tasks they must complete, and they must continue to be active, or they lose their moderation status.

* There's no permanent relationship: you can use social media/SO once, leave, and return any time you like, and leave again. This is not true for moderators.

Great point. It makes sense that it wouldn't just be the value you might get or give but the terms under which you do it. That's a logical distinction to make.

My karma score is pretty big evidence against the theory that there’s no permanent relationship. Users can become highly invested in particular communities!

I also abide by fairly strict code of conduct / moderation policies when writing on certain platforms. If I don’t abide by the community rules my posts can be flagged or even my account banned.

Paid writing is absolutely a trade, so I can’t see how any policy that sweeps up moderation can’t also equally apply to comment writing.

The government has a nasty habit of taking a concept like “work” or “income” and then applying it to literally everything so that they can regulate and tax literally everything. To the point where the IRS had to define specific exceptions for family chores lest they be deemed as barter and requiring the payment of payroll taxes.

Luckily in this case we have the 1st Amendment which should provide a pretty strong defense against any attempt to limit basic community social activities and the necessity of moderating those interactions.

Despite the fact that [I would hope] my comments on HN accrue significant value to the HN site, and that those comments are indeed work of the kind that some people even get paid for, my 1st amendment right to post here should override the interest of the State in establishing minimum wage requirements. Would love to hear a constitutional law scholar’s thoughts on this!

> To the point where the IRS had to define specific exceptions for family chores lest they be deemed as barter and requiring the payment of payroll taxes.

Hold on a minute here, can you point me to where this is actually codified? I found "Publication 926 (2019), Household Employer's Tax Guide" but that doesn't seem to be quite right. Or I just didn't read enough of that rather lengthy document.

> my 1st amendment right to post here should override the interest of the State in establishing minimum wage requirements

I'm not sure I've ever run into a situation where constitutional law was used to continue doing a thing for free. Genuinely interesting POV there.

> That's not true for moderators: they have specific tasks they must complete, and they must continue to be active, or they lose their moderation status.

That’s not correct: especially on the small sites, it’s acceptable for moderators to be inactive for long periods of time. It’s not great, but it’s understood that moderators have lives, and that they’re … not employees. I can state this confidently because I used to be a moderator on smaller sites, and I finally resigned from one (without having been in any way encouraged to) after almost a year of inactivity.

> especially on the small sites, it’s acceptable for moderators to be inactive for long periods of time

Interesting!

I can see that being a case against the original point then: if moderators really are free to work or not work however they'd like, then that seems to suggest that they don't match this test, and they're nothing like employees at all.

Do you have to turn up enough to keep up with the moderation queue on those small sites though? If there were a whole bunch of flags waiting on a small site for a while, and as a moderator you weren't helping out, would you lose your moderator status there?

That’s exactly what happened, and no, I didn’t lose my status. There are internal metrics for showing individual moderators’ activity but — at least while I was a moderator —these were purely FYI, and not used to enforce activity. I eventually resigned because I was aware that my inactivity was causing backlog that created more work for other moderators. I don’t remember exactly what happened next but since moderators are elected yearly by the community I suspect that new elections were held. However, I need to emphasise that I was relatively inactive for more than a year, and completely inactive for many months.

The official limit is no activity for 6 months, at that point the moderator status is supposed to be removed. This has been enforced rather inconsistently at times.

Interesting, thanks for the correction. … if I ever knew this I forgot it.

But does that mean that the moderator can just take one action every six months and retain their status?

You couldn't do that in a job!

You can absolutely do that in some very specific kinds of jobs, I've seen it first hand in public offices.

What kind of job? The person who prepares and files my taxes will retain their status as "my" CPA basically forever, but they only do my taxes once per year.

checkout the steemit platform for an example of an online community where all forms of contributing, as long as people believe it added value, can be rewarded. The content is mostly crypto related, but I think its an interesting alternative to our current reputation based models because it means you can transfer the value you contributed to that site into real money whereas reputation is non transferable accross different platoforms.

Moderating is very different from a letter to the editor. A moderator is making editorial decisions on behalf of the company using company guidelines and standards. They are held to a set of standards as well, and released from their service if they violate them.

Contributions are more like letters to the editor. The content has value to the company, but the company doesn’t exert control over either the asking or answering of questions.

The whole point of Stackoverflow, which was pretty clear if you listened to the podcasts that described some of the early planning aspects of the community was that it would be self-governing. Decisions were later made to implement a Wikipedia-style moderation system, which is problematic at a for-profit company.

The fact remains that moderating forums is labor, and stack exchange receives a lot of value from that labor that the mods themselves don't see a dime of.

Yes, but ...arrgh... they are doing this of their own free will and choice, perhaps because they enjoy it, they increase their social interactions, increase their skills... etc. It seems contrary to the concept of freedom if private parties cannot engage in such a relationship, if each and both so choose.

The idea behind these laws limit the extent that people can circumvent minimum wage. It also prevents de facto enslavement or indentured servitude, but probably to a lesser degree.

This type of discussion usually comes up in the context of internship positions, where federally an unpaid internship must not displace employees and must provide no value to the employer.

I'm not saying that the situation is necessarily bad, or that the people who willingly do this for free are suckers. I can't speak for them, and I don't know the conditions that the moderators labor under.

All I'm saying that the situation is still exploitation, no matter how you cut it. More and more businesses derive their main value from unpaid contributors, and it's something that should give us all pause.

I run a forum and there's no shortage of people who would happily volunteer for a mod role.

You have it wrong though: they get plenty of compensation through reputation, clout, and a feeling of power over their peers and being heard and helping out in a community that they love (or some combo of these). That's why they do it. Why is that not a fair trade without money exchanging hands?

Growing up, I used to mow an aging neighbor's lawn because he was basically couch-ridden. It made me feel good to help someone else out. Was I being exploited and should I have demanded payment, or was that just a fair trade that I volunteered for and could quit at any time?

Or look no further than HN. Participating on this forum writing content and enriching YC's coffers is "labor". And our compensation is procrastination and venting and feeling some satisfaction for scrawling our opinions online. If we didn't like that deal, we wouldn't be here.

The thing is, the service and main value that Stack Exchange provides is literally a moderated forum for people to ask and answer questions. Without that moderation, the service would be much less valuable, because it would be full of spam and worthless questions and answers, and less people would use it. This is what drives their revenue and their valuation.

This isn't the case with HN, where the main contribution of the forums to their business is mainly brand recognition.

And where HN has paid, full-time mods. dang and sctb. Even just for the brand recognition!

>I run a forum and there's no shortage of people who would happily volunteer for a mod role.

There's no shortage of people who want to be rulers of a community. Of those, it is always hard to find the ones who are actually fit for that purpose.

have it wrong though: they get plenty of compensation through reputation, clout, and a feeling of power over their peers

That sounds a lot like the "social influencer" pitches to get free stuff in return for "exposure".

Should we require the elderly to pay their adult children minimum wage for looking after them? Because that is far more like work than being a moderator on a website.

If the elderly person requires the child to wear a tee-shirt with and advert on, which the elderly person earns money off, and the elderly person is getting rich off asking the child to look after them for "good will" then... yeah, they probably should be paid. It's not charity, it's not family, it's exploitation.

> So even in traditional media there's a little precedent for this.

There may not be a precedent in traditional media but boy there is an Internet entity that well known to us already: Wikipedia.

Many forget that Wikipedia (where anyone can contribute) was part inspiration for SE as was Experts-Exchange, and Wikipedia is indeed organized as a non-profit via WikiMedia.

This meta post might be the one that forces investors to re-organize SE as the social good that it is rather than as an asset that needs to be exploited.

that's obfuscating the real point. Moderators are doing curation on behalf of the company, not simply using a platform to interact with other people.

All reasonable people understand the difference.

Seems like there's also a good case for Reddit moderators to not be volunteers as well. To be honest I've always thought the community moderated model has seemed like somewhat of a loophole that was eventually going to be closed. It's having your cake and eating it too. IMHO you can either have UGI with a professional moderator team OR you can have professionally made content with no moderator team.

Maybe Reddit should be turned into a shopping mall type of business where subs can be run however the sub mods want, but they have to pay a monthly rent to Reddit. I wonder if that would make things better or worse there?

It would kill 99.9% of the subs there and utterly change the culture.

Do you think it would make things better or worse?

Depends on your definition of better or worse, it would be different that's for sure.

Personally, I believe it would be worse. I'm in favor of free speech, and free online expression. Imagine what might happen to any of the pun-related subreddits, or r/keming if someone had to pay.

r/NBA brought to you by Huawei.

I think Reddit moderators are less restricted/directed by Reddit so they fall closer on the spectrum to the guy running a debate club/whatever at the local community centre. I don't think anyone would argue that they're an employee of the community centre, even if the community centre prohibited alcohol at their events.

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.

So... I don't know!

"I think Reddit moderators are less restricted/directed by Reddit"

Several former mods have gone public with how the Admins basically told them "Do this or we remove your community and ban you."

Nobody would argue that they're an employee of the community centre, but it seems obvious that they're a volunteer doing volunteer work at the community centre - and NY law says that either the community centre is a non-profit, or it can't have volunteers; if that's a for-profit organization then that guy running a debate club must be paid minimum wage.

Yea I mod a sub with a few thousand subs.

I definitely shouldn't be subject to labor laws for that work. It's organizing stuff around a hobby, not creating concrete value for or at the discretion of Reddit the business.

Some of the bigger subs though should have full time staff on the mod teams however.

I believe the key difference also is that you can just not do your work without reddit really minding (that's how some subs have died). That's very different from Stack Exchange.

Tricky one, technically could you can setup your own SubReddit, start moderating it and call yourself an employee?

I just became aware of this whole "powermod" phenomena where individual mods oversee many subs. Like 30+. I just recently learned about them but I guess they're sort of admins favorites since they essentially do their bidding while still looking like "part of the community". Totally feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Not really.

Reddit doesn't claim ownership of the subreddits.

A subreddit is something 1 user creates, getting ownership of that subreddit, and then that 1 user is free to appoint other mods.

This is more akin to a facebook group.

They take subreddits away from people from time to time.

This would break a lot more services, including a substantial number of Open Source projects and communities (specifically, any that are primarily run by a company rather than a non-profit).

Maybe that's a good thing? Companies are ruining the Internet.

No it wouldn't. It's not just the fact that people are doing unpaid work. There are a number of other requirements that have to be met, which SE seems to meet with regards to how it handles moderators. Just being an unpaid moderator doesn't run afoul of the laws.

I'd really appreciate if you'd be willing to expand on this.

It's not clear to me what the difference is between the moderation happening on StackOverflow and the moderation happening on Wikipedia, other than that Wikipedia is non-profit. But having non-profit designation be the key factor in deciding whether or not someone can volunteer seems like a rule that would have some really negative side-effects.

The 5 points I see online are:

- Degree of Control Exercised

- Profit, Loss, and Investment

- Skill and Independent Initiative

- Integral Part of Business

Are there others that I'm missing?

> having non-profit designation be the key factor in deciding whether or not someone can volunteer seems like a rule that would have some really negative side-effects.

This is literally the distinction discussed in the posted question and is pretty standard law in the US. What negative consequences do you see as a result of this?

Not all Open Source companies are nonprofit.

See Redhat Linux, Gitlab, Chromium, Docker. If a volunteer helps triage issues for these projects, is it a violation of labor laws?

If only nonprofit Open Source companies can use the benefits of Open Source development -- community involvement, community moderation and support, 3rd-party patches, etc... that's a really big reduction in who can participate in Open Source, particularly during a time when we're increasingly worried about Open Source funding and sustainability.

Gitlab even organizes events around community contributions.[0] If the effect of a law is to make it harder for a community to get directly involved with a product, that's likely a negative consequence. I really like that I can get involved with Gitlab. I don't feel like Gitlab is exploiting me.

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/community/issue-bash/

This is begging the question.

> If only nonprofit Open Source companies can use the benefits of Open Source development -- community involvement, community moderation and support, 3rd-party patches,

There is more involved here than any one of those things mentioned. There are certain requirements that need to be met. You listed the five criteria New York has, and so in New York's case, those requirements would have to be considered. Simply having moderators doesn't mean you run afoul of the laws behing discussed.

Sure, but... that's what I asked. I wanted someone to expand on the requirements that had to be met.

Would anyone be willing to explain in more detail on how the criteria differ and why this doesn't apply to Open Source companies like Gitlab/Wikipedia/etc?

I brought up for-profit companies like Gitlab only to clarify why I thought drawing a bright line based on purely nonprofit status as the only distinction would have negative consequences.

> This is literally the distinction discussed in the posted question and is pretty standard law in the US. What negative consequences do you see as a result of this?

> Would anyone be willing to explain in more detail on how the criteria differ and why this doesn't apply to Open Source companies like Gitlab/Wikipedia/etc?

I mean, they don't meet the criteria because they don't.

I guess I should ask: why do you think they meet all the criteria? What specific reasons makes you think that?

Well, taking volunteer commits to Gitlab just as an example:

- Degree of Control Exercised

Gitlab has the final say over every pull request, on what issues they'll consider pull requests for. Gitlab has a code of conduct and can ban contributors that violate that code. Gitlab prioritizes and labels issues that they want volunteers to look at. Seems equivalent to Stack Exchange's moderation queue.

- Profit, Loss, and Investment

Gitlab is a for-profit company. Open Source contributions get rolled up into their for-profit enterprise offerings.

- Skill and Independent Initiative

Fixing issues requires a great deal of specialized skill with the codebase, some of which is codebase specific and not generalizable. Individuals can choose to participate (similarly to Stack Exchange), but individuals are not free to pursue any project they want. Participation means following Gitlab's design process and looking at issue labels.

Similarly to Stack Exchange moderation queue, Gitlab hands me a list of issues that are ready for development and I pick out the issues that I want to work on.

- Permanence of Relationship

Volunteer developers to Open Source projects often form long-term relationships with the projects they contribute to. An answer on the main post links to a 2009 guidance letter that calls out for a for-profit nursing home as being in violation of the law for bringing in volunteers to help with events.[0]

With that letter as context, it's not clear to me whether or not permanence requires an explicit contract, or just an understanding that the activity or event is not a rare, one-off occurrence.

- Integral Part of Business

Developing software is an integral part of Gitlab's core business.

It's true that volunteers don't do all of Gitlab's development, but is that a defense? If I was illegally exploiting employees by classifying them as volunteers, I couldn't just say, "but I only did it to a few of them." As far as I can see, the law doesn't say, "you can classify up to 10% of your core employees as unpaid volunteers."

IANAL, I'm only here because I'm curious about any aspects of the law I'm missing.

[0]: https://www.labor.ny.gov/legal/counsel/pdf/Volunteers-Intern...

Thanks for answering. Good questions. IANAL either, but I figure I can share my perspective.

> Gitlab has the final say over every pull request, on what issues they'll consider pull requests for. Gitlab has a code of conduct and can ban contributors that violate that code. Gitlab prioritizes and labels issues that they want volunteers to look at.

None of that is control the law is talking about. SE exerts control over how much the work the moderators do. e.g. If you don't do enough moderating, you are no longer a moderator. Also, anyone can be a contributor. SE doesn't allow anyone to be a moderator in this case. If I'm not mistaken, you "apply" or are "invited." There is a selection process, a "hiring" committee if you will.

> Gitlab is a for-profit company. Open Source contributions get rolled up into their for-profit enterprise offerings.

GitLab also has programmers doing this work as well. They are investing in this area already. While GitLab benefits from open source contributions, they aren't reliant on it. The suggestion is that if SE suddenly had no more free moderators, they'd have to actually start investing in paid moderators.

> Fixing issues requires a great deal of specialized skill with the codebase, some of which is codebase specific and not generalizable. Individuals can choose to participate (similarly to Stack Exchange), but individuals are not free to pursue any project they want. Participation means following Gitlab's design process and looking at issue labels.

So, actually this is wrong: "but individuals are not free to pursue any project they want". That's the nature of being open source. Contributors can, if they want, start working on something else. That doesn't mean GitLab has to accept their commits, but as a contributor, I can work on something else and still contribute.

> Volunteer developers to Open Source projects often form long-term relationships with the projects they contribute to.

If their code is accepted, it will generally stick around for the life of a project. One could argue that it's very much a long-term relationship with just a single commit. That being said, I think the idea is the committing part that matters. And there you have people that commit one change, and those who commit many.

With SE, moderators all follow the same requirements. With GitLab, a contributor can be defined as a one time committer or someone who has committed hundreds of patches.

> It's true that volunteers don't do all of Gitlab's development, but is that a defense?

I think we can both agree the majority of GitLabs business needs are handled by GitLab's developers it pays. I think it's fair to say they contribute substantially financially to the software development of its product.

The way I look at it is simple. If SE were to hire moderators (which all the social networks I know of do already), would their job and roll be effectively the same as current moderators? I'm pretty sure they would look very similar.

Whereas with GitLab, you can directly compare the two and see that the open source contributors and paid developers aren't effectively the same. Requirements of code quality and passing tests aren't the same thing as minimum time spent doing the programming each month.

I don't see any issues with open source projects suffering from this. Contributors aren't treated like employees. Moderators at SE seem to be, with requirements to show up and meet performance requirements to maintain "employment" as moderators.

> See Redhat Linux, Gitlab, Chromium, Docker. If a volunteer helps triage issues for these projects, is it a violation of labor laws?

Perhaps this is an indicator that for-profit companies that solicit volunteer contributions to open source projects should set up a non-profit organization to manage the open source project separately from the for-profit business that sells support and / or provides paid turnkey solutions.

> particularly during a time when we're increasingly worried about Open Source funding and sustainability.

I don't think any of the open source projects owned by for-profit companies you list have sustainability issues. It is possible it would reduce the degree to which for-profit companies accept pull-requests to their open source software , but it might also encourage the adoption of more open governance of corporate run open-source projects. It might also push more volunteer developer hours towards those projects that aren't owned by for-profit interests and help solve some of the sustainability issues those projects face.

> I really like that I can get involved with Gitlab. I don't feel like Gitlab is exploiting me.

The issue is less that volunteers (such as you) are exploited / negatively impacted, since these volunteers are participating voluntarily. The issue is more that allowing companies to have "free employees" unfairly competes with the hiring of people who can't or don't want to volunteer their time.

Since software developers currently enjoy high salaries, you may not see this as much of a downside. However, writers, editors, moderators, photographers and other 'creative' professions often don't see the same levels of compensation as software developers. It seems potentially a little greedy to me to insist that highly paid software developers retain the right to volunteer on a wider range of software projects at the expense of lower salaries for workers in other professions.

> Perhaps this is an indicator that for-profit companies that solicit volunteer contributions to open source projects should set up a non-profit organization to manage the open source project separately from the for-profit business that sells support and / or provides paid turnkey solutions.

The vast majority do, and it's getting more and more common.

> It seems potentially a little greedy to me to insist that highly paid software developers retain the right to volunteer on a wider range of software projects at the expense of lower salaries for workers in other professions.

Are you saying that either everybody should be able to volunteer or nobody should?

If the Open Source project is free, then there are no profits generated from it. Doesn't seem to be applicable under this law.

You wouldn't say that Redhat is generating money from Linux?

Red Hat's money comes from support subscriptions, which are all provided by paid employees. Red Hat doesn't use volunteers to provide support to customers. Volunteer work is done at many levels (linux kernel, GNU libs, GNOME, Fedora, etc.) but Red Hat does not make money from those projects directly (no more than any other company would/could). In fact Red Hat employs people to just work on those projects, and gives all the output to the community for free to benefit everyone.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but I'm speaking as myself, not as a Red Hat employee

Not just services. It'd also theoretically break (if taken to an extreme):

Wikis, since most wikis don't pay their admins/bureaucrats. Like most of the ones on Wikia, Gamepedia, the NIWA, etc.

Old school fan sites, which often went with volunteer staff teams

Quite a few media/fan run/gaming news sites, which also often have volunteer writers.

etc

It wouldn't kill Wikis, it would just force them to operate as non-profits. Maybe not such a bad change. If they want to be a for-profit, they can still have volunteer writers but no volunteer admins.

Good. I've had enough of these companies tricking people into working for them for free.

I would have thought for this to be true, both the company and volunteer would need to be in NY state. IIRC I don't need to extend my NY labour obligations to my Californian employees (however as a NY company I would still be required to follow Californian labour laws with regards to employees there).

Wouldn’t social networks fall under a similar category? I get that they are different but there is a lot of overlap.

If they are in violation then I think the law needs to be updated.

Reddit certainly would. Moderating a top subreddit is definitely as much work as most part time jobs, and essential to that site actually being good.

Subreddit moderators are controlled by those who control the subreddit, not by Reddit itself (with, IIRC, a few exception where the moderators are Reddit employees).

It doesn't matter how much work it is or whether it is important. What matters is whether or not the circumstances of the working arrangement qualify it legally as an employment.

AFAIK, Reddit doesn't organizationally require their community mods to do anything at all.

Facebook already pays its moderators.

> Wouldn’t social networks fall under a similar category?

Most social networks I'm aware of pay moderators.

A bunch of non-lawyers taking a tiny chunk of law in isolation and speculating about whether something "seems illegal" based on it is really, really useless.

And this HN thread is just going to be even more of that.

> A bunch of non-lawyers taking a tiny chunk of law in isolation and speculating about whether something "seems illegal" based on it is really, really useless.

To me, this is rather a sign that the law is far too complicated and should be radically simplified.

Common Law is rarely simplified.

All laws start out as simple concepts. Then they need to be applied to reality, where very few situations are simple.

Just like programming.

An operating system provide a few set of basic services to applications, but the linux kernel is some gazillion lines of code, because it has to work with reality

> but the linux kernel is some gazillion lines of code, because it has to work with reality

Rather: Because the kernel developers care far too little about keeping it small and minimal.

Humans and human societies are the most complex systems we know of, and are full of people who will exploit any edge cases or loopholes.

I think that this greatly limits how much simplification you can have in a legal system and still have it be effective.

There is always a well-known solution to fix every human problems — neat, plausible, and wrong.

And ignores the fact that plenty of Lay activists volunteer time without problem.

The funniest thing is there is implicit discussion of a remedy other than New York users being banned from activities that qualify as work.

IANAL, but it is generally illegal to volunteer for a for-profit organization federally. See the Fair Labor Standards Act and Dept of Labor site [1].

The most relevant recent test I can find resulted in a settlement, when AOL paid people who contributed articles without payment[2]. There's been some conflicting decisions in other related cases and many are still in progress.

1.https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp 2. https://archives.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/aol_settled_with_...

If laymen can not read, parse, and understand law, then laymen can not follow the law, and laymen can not have due process.

Or in other words, lawyers are a value add, not a necessity.

That's not what due process is.

Part of due process requires the ability to know an action breaks the law before you do that action.

Meaning it has to be possible to understand what is legal/illegal for all american citizens, not just the ones rich enough to afford a lawyer.

> A bunch of non-lawyers taking a tiny chunk of law in isolation and speculating about whether something "seems illegal"

Motions, Petions, and Trial are essentially the same, except typically also include Lawyers in addition to non-lawyers (pro-se), and rather than speculation, it's called Argument.

AOL got hit by that years ago.[1]

[1] https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/

I read through the comments specifically to see how long it would be until someone recommended the question be closed as off topic.

Was not disappointed.

Classic SO.

By this logic, shouldn't the people posting questions also be considered illegal volunteers?

I dont think so. The question askers and answers arent expected to do anything, and you could argue they are doing it out of their own self interest, which is the whole point of the site. In other words, they are the customers. Moderators on the other hand are held to certain standards, have to maintain a certain amount of moderations, and are actually doing it to better SO as a whole.

Moderators are doing it out of their own self interest, too. They're not doing it for money, so if they aren't enjoying it they can quit with zero repercussions, right?

ETA: So because of the psychic toll that it may or may not take on volunteer moderators, moderating for free for a for-profit company is illegal?

I guess I can understand this: It's half protecting people from getting into an unhealthy psychological trap where they're on a hamster wheel for a for-profit company but their reward is continued volunteer status rather than income. And it's half forcing for-profit companies to redistribute wealth by mandating that essentially no labor shall be free.

Unfortunately that hurts people who, with their eyes open from the beginning, want to volunteer and who don't care that the organization is making money from it. It also hurts companies by shrinking their labor pools for tasks that could potentially be shifted to volunteers.

Yes and that's pretty much the definition of volunteering too.

Volunteers get laws and protections to prevent exploitation, which is what the NY laws were probably created to prevent.

Turns out that the genuine and thorny question of free labor keeping Reddit/FB and other platforms alive is going to be tackled via NY laws.

(Yes, FB also has its own paid moderators and outsourced staff who suffer PTSD etc.)

I for one think this is a great conversation - moderating isn't cost less, and takes a toll on the moderators, for which there is little recognition.

Well by that logic you could say the same thing about retired people that take part time jobs just so they have something to do every day.

They're not necessarily doing it for the money, and most states in the US allow you to quit at any time without repercussions, but it'd still be illegal to have them work for free.

It's more about whether the person is doing 'employee-like' duties and how much control the company has over the person's actions that determines whether they should be classified as an employee or not.

Users can come and go as they please, and post as infrequently as they like. Moderators, however, must post with a certain frequency or risk being demoted.

Well, it's like you're saying volunteer work should never exist. You absolutely have employee-like duties at the volunteer soup kitchen and basically any volunteer outfit.

If someone really is just doing something to keep themselves busy and they are perfectly happy not being paid, then that seems like a fair deal to me. I've done that when my buddy started a bar at the beach. I would help him take orders while I sat down there and he got some intermittent help. What's the matter? Groveling for money changes the entire relationship into something that I do not want.

I think you have to make the case that there's some sort of exploitation going on. I could see how you'd make that argument regarding a 16yo "intern" who bought your bullshit that they are bussing your tables 18 hours a day for "work experience". But you lost me on your own example. Let's say, suggesting that a retired millionaire who voluntarily takes orders at a bar for four hours a day for fun is being exploited unless they're paid $2.15/hr like the other staff.

The critical distinction here is that a soup kitchen is not a for-profit venture, but Stack Exchange is.

It's certainly not a distinction users care about. And apparently it's not the distinction the law cares about either since it's clearly much more complex than that.

My forum is for-profit and users will line up around the block to be a moderator. Why is it that the only compensation we can wrap our heads around is money?

> Well, it's like you're saying volunteer work should never exist.

You're missing "at a for-profit company". Once you'd add that, I (and NY) would say "Yes". (But I'm not the GP).

What if a moderator is a H1B or F1 holder, or any other foreign nationals who are not authorized to work for SE?

Will they have to quit being a moderator immediately? Accepting payment from SE would definitely be violating immigration laws.

This raises some serious questions for anywhere with user/volunteer based content/moderation. Sites like Reddit operate on a model very similar to Stack Exchange, and any user-moderated forum that runs ads to pay for hosting/maintenance costs would seem to have the same issues.

It also raises questions about the status of Instagram influencers, you-tube personalities, or anyone on a platform that derives it's value from those it hosts but does not treat/pay them as employees.

Even games with user-generated/managed content. If a game developer is paid for generating content, why would the create of such user-generated content not qualify?

Virtually anywhere someone is doing something that they arguably could be paid for would seem subject to a law like this.

I'm not a lawyer, but there is a common-sense difference between Stack Exchange and Reddit.

On Reddit, it's just a community having a discussion. The participants, even the moderators, are mainly involved in guiding a discussion, and Reddit just facilitates that.

On Stack Overflow, the moderators really are working directly on improving the site's content. They're practically unpaid editors.

> On Stack Overflow, the moderators really are working directly on improving the site's content. They're practically unpaid editors.

So do non-moderators. In fact, there are some users who do more work towards improving the site’s content (via editing, handling suggestions, etc.) than some moderators. In fact, “trusted users” have access to many of the same moderation tools as moderators, and editing content is actively encouraged (via functionality, badges …) for all users.

In many of the subreddits the mods are directly improving the site's contents through extensive manual filtering and moderation. Some subreddit mods also manually manage "flair" including various forms of "verification." There are may subreddits that would be effectively unusable due to spam and irrelevant content without such moderation. Some social media sites pay people to conduct this kind of filtering and curation, so it doesn't feel like a stretch to me to say Reddit mods might qualify here.

I'm not saying that there isn't a "common-sense" counter-argument to some of the cases I noted, but "common-sense" is a defense to be raised in court, the case is brought based on if the law could apply. In my mind that's troubling as it weaponizes the law in a way it could easily be abused.

It is just one of the many aberrations that we lived with without noticing.

Our digital era, that has only started will pin point those aberrations in people's heads. Until enough of us branch off the regulations and national business laws entirely.

It's just a matter of time imo.

> except for a short term recreational or amusement event run by that organization.

Looking at the recent developments at stack exchange, it fits "Amusement event".

I'm curious if this same argument could be made for reviewers of scientific journals. Don't they perform the same / similar functions?

Ban Stack Exchange in NY state. Problem solved.

On serious note (and to avoid pitchfork holding HN mods) : May be it violates NY labour law under some interpretation, but that is an indication that the law is not well thought through and kills innovation. When people complain that a labour law will kill innovation most people tend to dismiss those suggestions. Well here it is now.

True. Worth noting that this is coming up because the volunteers are being mistreated and people were looking for laws that could protect them, and may have found more than they were looking for.

I am not whole opposed to the idea that companies that extract value from content created by their users should be forced to operate as non-profits that operate for the public good.

The biggest drawback I see is that this could lead to large scale lobbying to greatly reduce the limitations placed on sich non-profits.

The biggest drawback is that sites like Reddit become infeasible or much less useful.

I find it hard to get outraged that Reddit profits from user contributions and discussions given that the useful bits to me and others are provided at no cost.

So, this whole time they've been doing it for free AND illegally? Hilarious.

Didn't AOL go through this exact same thing back in the day? I'm pretty sure I recall them having volunteer moderators was declared illegal.

Is this being inspired by a bunch of former moderators?

They can’t be in violation of labour law if they fire all their moderators for refusing to comply with the mandatory pronouns CoC!

Maybe they're in violation of some of those new "anti-bullying" laws. Ever try asking (or answering) a question there?

moderators, why not contributors too? can any for profit be associated with open source or similar without falling under one of these laws?

It has a lot to do with how much power the "employer" has (one of the 5 factors discussed in the answers).. its pretty normal that someone can employ you today to contribute to opensource and choose your direction, or not employ you and hope your direction and theirs doesn't fork..

(When they try to control all the PMs, etc but accept public work when it happens to fit, then I do think they are in the grey area.)

edit-terms&redundancy..

Does this hold true for sites like Quora as well?

How about Reddit mods?

These companies may also need to be head quartered in NY like Stack Exchange is.

Is that true, or would they just need to have "employed" a moderator who resides in NYS?

I did some reading and I think you are correct.

If I start a subreddit, I become a moderator. Reddit didn’t ask me to start the sub so I’m not sure it would be the same thing. Unless they are actively recruiting mods for larger subreddits, perhaps.

The law doesn't seem to make a distinction about who initiated the relationship, only the nature of it. And the existence of organized/moderated subreddits is definitely an "integral part of the employer's business."

Seems it would destory the business model entirely then. If Reddit (the company) had to pick and choose which subs to support and pay the moderators, it would be a far less useful and interesting place….which is kind of the point of raising the question on SE, I guess.

New York law uses five factors to determine if someone is an employee. Reddit is fine on several points: the degree of control exercised by the employer over the workers and the permanence or duration of the working relationship. Being a moderator of a sub-reddit doesn't entail anything other than creating the sub-reddit, which anyone can do. In addition, there is no requirement for spending time moderating that sub-reddit. This is different from Stack Exchange.

I would agree that’s true for most smaller subreddits, but I'm pretty sure the Reddit admins have a non-trivial amount of interaction with the mods of the largest and most central subreddits. I'd also agree that if this went before a court, I would expect it to find that the mods did not qualify, but the fact that the law seems vague enough to require clarification by a court is itself a problem.

There is a fuzzy difference between how sites Reddit and Stack Exchange operate, but if Stack Exchange is violating labor laws, what change to Reddit might move it across that fuzzy line? It puts a site like Reddit in an odd position where involving themselves more directly in the moderation of their own site, in terms of requirements for subreddits and mods, tools or directions/expectations for how communities are moderated, etc, could move them into a position of violating those laws.

The process is to employ/pay human moderators, similar to Facebook [1]. They also pay for some content creation [2].

[1] https://help.quora.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001069906-How-do...

[2] https://help.quora.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000673263-Partne...

Judging from the comments in SE the answer is, yes.

While we're discussing Stack Overflow's legal situation:

- Users have raised $9000 to defend a volunteer moderator from defamation by Stack Overflow employees: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming...

- Stack Overflow illegally changed the content license without permission from authors (Creative Commons allows such license changes for adaptations but not collections such as Stack Exchange) and refuse to clarify their legal justification (do they feel they have the right to change to any license they choose?): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

- Their general counsel appears to have left the company a little before all of this happened: https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/80154...

Reason #4000 to not have a physical presence in the state of New York.

I'm sorry but this law is kinda ridiculous.

What state allows for-profit organizations to solicit unpaid volunteer labor from people outside of prison?

It’s a pretty obvious violation of Federal law and multiple state laws.

What are unpaid internships if not unpaid volunteer labor?

A quick Google suggests some difference in the US, in law if not practice. In particular that the internship experience is for the benefit of the intern and the company derives no immediate benefit from the intern's activities (and may even be impeded by them)

A: Big compliance issues!

Most employers that I’ve work with that utilize unpaid interns do so through a college to ensure a linkage to the interns development.

Outside of that, it’s cheaper to pay minimum wage than to deal with the overhead of making sure your managers follow the rules.

There are specific criteria that should be met for an internship to be offered without payment. Generally, an unpaid internship must be purely educational, not displace employees, employer does not derive profit from the intern, and there is no expectation of a job offer at the end.

At my employer, interns are effectively additional staff for the duration of their employment, so they are paid market wages. The main difference between their position and that of a junior employee is hourly wages vs salaried.

Massively Massively Abused by a lot of industries like Media (the trades especially) and Fashion.

> What state allows for-profit organizations to solicit unpaid volunteer labor from people outside of prison?

I'm not aware of a state that allows that for people inside prison, either. Well, not technically. They get paid, it's just a lot less than someone on the outside would make.

Why should a state be able to stop me from doing whatever I want with my own time? It's my decision to do things with a group of others, not the government's.

Two reasons.

From a social justice perspective, allowing free labor is an insult to human dignity and leech in society. It is often associated with coercive behavior, and when events happen, like “workplace” injuries, society is stuck with cleaning up the mess.

From a revenue perspective, free labor is an untaxed gift to the company, and it’s highly likely that “free” really means compensation by some indirect, off book means.

A corporation isn’t a group of friends. You’re welcome to do anything in a group or charitable endeavor.

> "a social justice perspective, allowing free labor is an insult to human dignity and leech in society"

...... no, it isn't. The state does not own me. I should be free to do what I want with whomever I want. Not just whatever you deem to be "in a group or charitable endeavor".

Prison isn't volunteer labor. Its compulsory. I.e. Slavery and the exception built into the constitution.

Don't worry. New York only selectively enforces these types of things.

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