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Comment by remote_phone | Hacker News Reader

What is going to happen when Reddit ipo’s and the employees benefit financially from it, but the moderators who actually make reddit what it is get nothing?

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The internet has had paid and free communities and forums forever. I can’t think of a single one where voluntary non-employee moderators got paid. Tech support forums for ten billion dollar companies also sometimes have non-employee moderators who I’m pretty sure are not paid.

AOL used Community Leaders to moderate chats and forums. The CLs filed a complaint with the Department of Labor for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and eventually sued, winning a $15 million settlement.

It's a violation of the FLSA to use volunteers to do unpaid work at a for-profit company, even if the volunteers are OK with not getting paid. It's only going to take one mod to file a DoL complaint before Reddit scraps all the mods or centralizes the mod duties under actual employees.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp

What about the users who post content? Are they expected to get something too? Youtube and Twitch pay people who make content, in addition to paying moderators.

Twitch moderators get paid? That is news to me. Where do I sign up!

Yeah, I was wrong about that. Moderators don't get paid by Twitch (but some do get paid by the channel[1]). But Twitch Admins do get paid by Twitch[2].

Interesting that Twitch is sort of flipped from what remote_phone is proposing. Mods are not paid, but content creators are paid.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2qh5ov/do_twitch_mo...

[2] https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/twitch-chat-badges-guide?la...

While the comment insinuated they were paid by Twitch (Amazon), the reality is some of the biggest channels _do_ pay their channel moderators (creator to mods). A big example of this is CohhCarnage[0].

[0] https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/8040/cohhcarnage-on-how...

Nothing will happen, exactly like the last 14 years with the employees being paid salaries while users run the site for free.

Why do you think an IPO will be treated differently?

(deimorz is former Reddit staff and now operates a Reddit competitor)

I don’t know how that makes a difference to his comment. Which is exactly what I was thinking.

i don't know that it does make a difference to his comment, but on HN it's a standard practice (that i like) to disclose when commenting on your employers and competitors.

I understand your feeling, but it's also HN standard practice to assume good faith.

I think the first comment is quite short and, while it doesn't bring a lot to the table I think it's a feeling echoed by a many in the current community. (Not necessarily me, but the zeitgeist seems to be there). So, in this light, doing a disclosure on each and every comment is... Unreasonable, especially if it's something you feel deeply about.

They're not mutually exclusive and in fact are mutually reinforcing. As readers of a comment we are expected to read it charitably and part of that is assuming that the writer is not shilling. On the other hand we expect writers to disclose major conflicts of interest and I would categorize a direct competitor as a major conflict of interest (note I'm not calling deimorz a shill and do think his/her comment reflects a common sentiment, but I appreciate the knowledge that deimorz is working on a competitor).

The latter breeds the trust for the former to work.

Transparency is not worth it if a lot of people agree with you? Transparency is not worth it if it's something you care deeply about?

That is NOT what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that sometimes, lack of explicit discolosure can be (IMO) excused if the interest is not intentionally obfuscated and disclosure was done at some point in the past.

That means that, in my point of view, Deimorz raised a good, but biased point while failing to fully discose the contest within his comment, and notatoad brought extra missing context. Both, good things. But I would refrain from painting Deimorz as intentionally misleading, considering this, at most, unintentionally misleading.

> I would refrain from painting Deimorz as intentionally misleading

I don't think that's what happened here; in the same way that you saw Deimorz's comment as not malicious, I didn't see the response mentioning their connection to the issue as malicious either. You mention that the "disclosure was done sometime in the past", but I had never heard of them or the site they founded, so I found the comment replying with context to be informative.

In the vein of assuming good faith - please don't assume my comment was in bad faith. It wasn't meant as a criticism or a dismissal of his comment, just relevant context. A disclosure isn't just a disclosure of a potential bias, it's also a disclosure of relevant knowledge and experience.

I knew some context that i thought was relevant, so I added it. I wasn't trying to pick a fight.

There is an account profile in which you can write these things, if you're feeling like qualifying your comments is too onerous.

The user notes it prominently in their profile.

I also probably did thousands of hours of unpaid moderation and development work on Reddit before I worked there.

None of that's very relevant here though, other than showing that I'm intimately familiar with the dynamic from spending a lot of time on both sides of it.

Which competitor? Can you link to it please?

It's tildes.net, the best overall description of my goals/values for the site is the announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

It's not a competitor to Reddit in any meaningful sense though. If anything, my "target user" is almost the complete opposite of what Reddit prioritizes now. Calling it a competitor probably only makes sense if you still think of Reddit as the way it was like... 5-10 years ago.

It's invite-only to register, but feel free to email me at the address in the blog post and I'll send you one. (That offer's open to anyone else too.)

> other than showing that I'm intimately familiar with the dynamic from spending a lot of time on both sides of it.

Thats a pretty good argument for it to be relevant.

not really something that applies to this kind of comment.

They don’t get “nothing”, they get access to a platform and communities which they enjoy.

Not everybody’s metric is $

Nothing. If you wanted money why were you moderating Reddit when you knew you weren’t going to get any?

Do moderators expect to get paid?

They get paid in the satisfaction of exerting control over others, enforcing their bias in a community, and generally feeling powerful. That's the kind of person who tends to self-select to delete posts and ban people all day for free. Moderation gets so bad on reddit (visible from subreddits like watchredditdie and nolockedthreads) that many communities would be better off self-policed solely by up/down votes, all tradeoffs like spam and bad posts considered against the tyranny.

You can do that now? Create your own subreddit and pretty much enforce those rules, offer that sub as an alternative.

What reddit is today is simple: toxic. That shouldn't be rewarded.

Steem has an interesting approach to solve this.

Steemit[1] is the reddit alternative built on Steem[2].

[1] https://steemit.com/ [2] https://steem.com/

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