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Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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