An Introduction to Reddit’s ‘Slave Labour’ Subreddit

There is an alternative subreddit, /r/forhire, which tries to enforce higher pay, although there are tons of rulebreaking posts that the mods understandably have a hard time keeping up with.

My only /r/slavelabour experience was in 2014 or so, when I was in high school. Back then most users on it were from the “beer money” community looking for extra cash, rather than people trying to make a living. I picked up a request that was basically light research and data entry into a spreadsheet. The guy had tried to get it done via MTurk but the Turkers hadn’t followed directions well, and there were a few hundred lines left to fill out. I don’t remember actually agreeing on a payment in advance, other than my request that it be in Amazon gift cards. He paid $5 when the work was done, insisted that he’d send the full payment later, then sent some oddly specific amount like $52.23 a week later. Good pay for a couple hours’ work, but it felt shady the whole way through.

> It was only when I realized that one of my clients had his own editing website that everything changed. Turns out, this guy would offer to edit someone’s novel for, say, $2,000. He would then pay me $500 to edit it, then send my work back to their client and pocket the leftover $1,500 for himself. All he had to do was secure the sale and wait for me to finish up the work.

So this guy was selling his reputation for $2,000. If the author would have provided a bad service and the guy would send it to the client without proofreading then that guy would no longer be able to charge $2,000.

Here's the nonpaywalled friendly link so the author benefits when you read it: https://medium.com/better-marketing/an-introduction-to-reddi...

Outline link https://outline.com/NPeWHR