Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit

news.northwestern.edu

132 pointsrobtherobber123 comments

Yeah, and home cooks do billions of dollars worth of free cooking per year for their friends and family. The fact that something can be valued in dollars doesn't actually mean that it's wrong that it's being done for no monetary compensation. You can put a dollar value on anything, including every constructive hobby, sport, and pastime that people do.

Home cooking doesn't have a single business entity that aggregates this value though. Reddit would be worth much less without this free labor, as well as most other social media companies would without user generated comment.

It also isn't a public service which makes it quite different to me at least. A better analogy might be 'soup kitchen' staff, gurdwara kitchen staff (at least I assume they're volunteers?), church choir & bell-ringers, etc.

Home cooking supports every worker and their children as future labor that aggregates into every business entity. A single business entity is not a requirement for this condition. See the entire underground economy of social reproduction.

Reddit’s core business is the comments, and moderation is a requirement. Some (many?jurisdictions have laws around what can legally be written, so moderation becomes important.

Cooking food isn’t the core business of my employer.

I mean I guess we can define core business whichever way we want, but if unpaid labor vanished overnight the entire economy would collapse so it actually is fundamentally connected to Reddit whether we like it or not.

What it means though is that the people doing the work are often doing it due to power tripping, political axe grinding or outright being paid by other organizations to astroturf their viewpoints.

Nothing is actually "free" and reddit isn't getting free moderation, there's a cost to that which shows up in the quality of the moderation.

It is sort of similar to the aphorism that if the product is "free" that you are really the product. The moderation (at least on large subreddits) comes at a cost, it just isn't a direct financial cost that reddit pays.

It's worse than that. They just added up the number of hours mods spend on Reddit and multiplied it by $20/hr.

That isn't "worth" - that's a "cost" estimate.

This comparison is moot. Home cooking isn't voluntary work in any sense, nor is it in any public interest. Its ensuring your _family_ has dinner. The alternatives (such as takeaway) are each more expensive.

The problem with your take is that free, public labor devalues paid, public work. This is also why its difficult to compete with 'free' services such as 'free email'.

Except those who benefit from home cooking are your family and friends, not the investor class/ad traders. Cant see how this relates at all..

Should your family pay you to cook, or did you actually cook for them because you like it.

Right, but the benefit is food for your family, not money for a corporation.

I find the premise of this... bizarre, I guess?

Reddit is a site that lets you create your own community about whatever (within some pretty permissive ToS grounds) you want and run it however you want. Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community? I don't see how it's any more relevant than the labor of all the people posting and voting on content.

To be fair it does seem like the group behind this study is also interested in the latter too. I'm just not sure I agree with the premise any more than I would agree with the premise that people calling each other on the phone are providing free labor to the phone company since you normally have to pay professionals (eg radio hosts) to produce audio content.

Maybe for the long-tail, but the largest subreddits are far from pet projects. I am under the impression that being a mod on a sub with millions of subscribers is at least a part time job and it's hard to imagine what Reddit would be like without the largest, most popular subreddits. In those cases, I think the premise of the study seems fair.

If you create a community that generates ad/gold/whatever revenue for Reddit mods should be able to get at least a bit of it. No communities = no revenue for Reddit.

Going from “doing it for fun” to being paid for it is probably going to destroy the spirit of a community.

That's true, and unfortunate, on one hand you want them to get paid for the work they put in, on the other hand it could introduce a chaos. How could that be solved?

>Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community?

Reddit is a for profit company that makes money off the work of these people. If it wasn't for mods, the site couldn't really exist as it is. Doesn't it seem a bit weird to you? Because it seems to me as though the "value" that this company creates is very much dependent on the free work of the mods (and the posters, for that matter). In the same vein, the reason why Wikimedia is a non-profit, it's because it would be wrong for a company to profit from the work of the unpaid editors that created all the articles and did all the research. Why should reddit be any different?

I once worked on a video game that was translated into many different languages for free by passionate community members. Since the game was frequently updated, eventually it made sense to give these "community translators" early access to new text. Also it made sense for them to provide their translations in a form our pipeline could consume. Voila, they have unpaid jobs.

I skipped a bunch of steps there, but basically through no malicious intent on anyone's part, people's passion was leveraged into making them work jobs with expectations and deliverables. Of course they were free to not do the work, but they'd be letting their community down if they didn't.

At that point we had an internal discussion about the ethics of the system, and wound up deciding we should pay them.

That's a very cool story, thank you for sharing it.

It would be weird to pay people for things that they are willing to do for free?

Heavens, no, I'm not arguing that. Trying to monetize our free time is what got us into this entire mess in the first place. Just that the dynamic is questionable, since it feels to me as though the company is abusing that willingness in order to make a profit.

They'd still be making a lot of money if they were non-profit.

And wikipedia doesn't let you make whatever article space you want. If wikimedia started hosting user-controlled wikis I wouldn't say they have the same obligations to those subsites.

"run it however you want"

This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.

Reddit may have some high profile cases where they banned a subreddit, I find Reddit rather tolerant. For example, there are several longstanding subreddits dealing with kinky sex, drugs, and kinky sex on drugs. Opposite and controversial viewpoints have their subreddits: prolife and prochoice, progun and guncontrol, vim and emacs, etc...

Most bans are for really terrible communities, and yes, for a few of them, I think it went a bit too far, I wouldn't have banned the_donald for instance, despite not wanting to have anything to do with them. Really, they do the minimum acceptable for a mainstream service.

"I find Reddit rather tolerant"

Only if you subscribe to the group think.

The truth is that reddit is one of the largest collection of bigots on planet earth.

It is also not possible to migrate a community to another platform.

It's possible, just not easy.

No, it is not possible. Reddit moderators don't even have access to the users that are subscribed to their subreddits.

You cannot do anything meaningful on the platform to contact users to let them know you've moved

You could link to an off-site webpage before the ban, and then post details of how to connect to the new site after.

And it's not like users couldn't have had contacts between each other and the moderators and couldn't spread the word about the new community.

That's not to mention the ability to evade bans to spread the word on Reddit itself, if need be.

Spreading the word is actually the relatively easy part... it's migrating all the old content to the new site that isn't made easy by Reddit, because (afaik) it doesn't offer any kind of export feature.. but the site could be scraped.

> I don't see how it's any more relevant than the labor of all the people posting and voting on content.

Moderating a reasonably large subreddit is a lot of work, compared to voting. A bit every day, all days of the year. Reddit even automatically prompts you to review new threads with a lot of participation. I've also received offers for paid (low) jobs from reddit in my inbox for new communities that they wanted to build. Did I mention the drama that ensues when community members aren't happy? "Ban this!" / "Don't censor this!"

YouTube is a site where people create their own channel, and YouTube moderation is done by people paid by YouTube and bots.

I think the premise of this is off. Instagram doesn't pay people either. The fascinating and difficult part of reddit's business is that almost the entire value of the platform is controlled by moderators. So if you want to influence reddit users you're better of doing deals with the mods than with reddit itself. Of course, because reddit doesn't have any real relationship with the moderators it's very easy for these mods to go off and do deals with advertisers directly with no oversight. We can probably argue about how often that happens, but there can't really be any doubt that it does happen. It's only when it boils over into public beef that we ever get a real glimpse of it[1]. But you don't have to be a genius to understand that some sub-reddits are just absolutely ripe for advertising - how much do you think it's worth for Uniqlo to be at the top of a fashion guide on /r/malefashionadvice? I'd bet you it's good money.

[1]:https://www.insider.com/wallstreetbets-reddit-bans-moderator...

> Instagram doesn't pay people either.

Of course Instagram pays it's moderation team.

Are the researchers really sure that the moderators on popular subreddits are really 'unpaid'? Recall the whole editor-for-hire scandals that plagued Wikipedia? A PR firm interested in controlling the direction of discussion on Reddit or Wikipedia has a large vested interest in having their paid staff members act as moderators for popular subreddits in order to control the direction of discussion and spike stories that don't fit their desired narrative, whether that be on behalf of a government or a corporation or an individual. This is hardly a new problem, see this story from 2012:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/wikipedia-ho...

> "Perhaps the paid-PR scandal is a coming of age for Wikipedia in the era of SEO shills, and the public's increasing awareness about powerful corners of the Internet -- and how subject they can be to the interests of close-knit friends and business associates. In this light, a Web site as insanely valuable as Wikipedia will always attract gaming for promotion."

This is hardly just the moderators on Reddit, there's also the armies of upvote and downvote bots that can be deployed to push a story to the top or bury it, ditto with comments, and then there's things like the outright bans for anyone raising particularly controversial topics (bans for mentioning the Wuhan lab leak on Reddit is one of the more blatant ones, for example).

All in all, social media is not what anyone in their right mind would call a 'reliable unbiased information source'.

I'm 100% sure that happens for the majority of large subs. Along with paid astroturfing on political subreddits.

I'd wager this is an extremely low estimate about the value of that labor. From the paper it seems like they compared with freelance moderators on upwork.

I'm a part of a couple of super niche subreddits where there are moderators with deep expertise in the area. I know that IRL some of these mods are often billing $100s/hour for their work but on reddit they do it free, and they freely dispense the same advice.

Just curious - what kind of expertise do these people bill that amount of money for?

Any white collar professional in engineering (full spectrum) has billing rates over $100 at entry level.

Even trades do it. Electricians, HVAC, and moreso for commercial jobs.

The difference is in who is doing the charging. White collar professionals usually pay themselves and thus keep most of the money.

When it's a trade the company gets 80/hr with the techs making about 20/hr.In California of course more is charged and more is paid but its still a slap in the face. You are literally the kne doing all but administration/dispatch which is the easy part. As soon as tradesmen with can they usually start working for themselves, hire more people, and perpetuate the parasitic cycle.

A defense contractor recently posted an $80 per hour contract near me for non-entry level EE design work.

Is $80 what the defense contractor is charging their customer?

My company charges $110/hr for an entry level engineer to work on your project.

EDIT: This is just offering a data point.

EDIT EDIT: If we assume a multiple of 2.5 (pretty standard), that $80 becomes $200/hr billed rate.

Sure, interested to know what deep moderation expertise involves though.

They are not experts in the process of moderation. They are experts in a field and also mod subs in that field.

They are also not experts in their field. Any time I see a topic in my field on Reddit the comments that imply expert knowledge are virtually guaranteed to be factually incorrect. I've never seen any evidence that a Reddit moderator possesses any special knowledge of any topic. Has your experience been different? Maybe I've just never visited the right subreddits.

Has your experience been different?

He is claiming it's different. It's his whole point.

So they're doing labor but not moderation labor, they could do the same thing with an unprivileged account?

Without getting into too much detail some of these are software/hardware (e.g. niche libraries and tools used in very specific industries) and some are non tech (maintenance for specific types of vehicles, animal care, etc)

If they are doing it for free, the value of the labor is zero by definition.

That’s like saying that if you donate to a charity, the value of the goods you gave must be zero because it was a donation

It's exactly like a donation actually. These people are not forced to be internet janitors, if they don't like it why are they even wasting their time on it. You can't even say that their livelihoods depend on it because they aren't being paid!

That's right. Value and Cost are not the same.

This line of reasoning is founded on a false premise: namely that the moderators who are not financially compensated get nothing out of performing the duties associated with their role. On the contrary, the endless supply of willing volunteers for the task suggests that they do get something significant out of it. I would suggest, to start: ego validation, feelings of personal power, and most importantly the ability to skew discussions in order to support one's desired viewpoint. I would suggest, additionally, that the last listed reason is a significant source of potential bias in moderation, in view of the fact that the value proposition of being a moderator is very appealing to an unrepresentative subset of users of a service. Furthermore the financial value of being able to do this is far greater than a typical paid content moderator wage.

You can think of it as free work, of you can think of it as people building something they care about. When I post on here I don't think of it as free work but more as contributing to a community I want to be part of.

Moderating content is not equivalent to posting.

Moderating is a part of community building and growing, however.

You're right. It's far more powerful than posting. Maybe they should be paying to be moderators, since they get extra influence over the conversations.

Voluntarily signing up for becoming a moderator for free borders on sociopathy. Some of these people are on a real power trip.

This is nothing new, although the scale of it definitely is.

The idea behind the superfan doing all your work has been studied and worked with for some time.

People on the internet will do an amazing amount of work for recognition or just meaningless internet points.

A great write-up on the matter: https://www.amazon.ca/Science-Social-Beyond-Likes-Followers-...

You used to be able to get this free from the Lithium website, but that might be gone now.

Reddit is toxic and the mods are power tripping. That is why they moderate. People who otherwise would have no social status in life where others will listen so they end up on reddit where others have to listen. Of course it is not every singe one of them but a lot of mods are just pathetic. Don’t agree with the narrative - banned. And this will be the downfall of reddit. Inconsistency across the site and unjust bans for merely disagreeing with a mods narrative. I would love to see reddit fail.

It's not just Reddit. All the major "social media" platforms, from YouTube to Facebook thrive off of unpaid work by content creators.

Amazon and IMBD thrive off of user reviews, which provide one of the main sources of value for users of their sites.

That's not to mention all the unpaid work by programmers who write all the open-source/Free software that are the foundation of many/most billion-dollar companies world-wide.

AOL’s settlement with volunteers drew out super clear conditions for community moderators to exist without ever getting paid and it’s the playbook all social media sites with community moderation follow.

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

People willing to do this for free remind me just a bit too much of all those angry Christian moms in the 80s-90s policing music and video games for “society’s own good.”

oh they're still doing it. Karen's are making youtube videos of themselves crying while listening to rap because "as a mom" it hurts them that their kid could hear it.

My head is not big enough to support the rolling my eyes want to do.

I’m glad the algorithm is sparing me of them.

A lot of them are not impartial moderators. They are more concerned with maintaining their echo chambers. So I highly doubt the labour is worth that much.

I do not see what your conclusion has to do with your premise.

Subreddits have topics and rules. Moderators curate posts to suit those topics and rules. This has value.

But you can, evidently, get people to maintain echo chambers for free. You can't necessarily get people to be impartial moderators for free.

They also curate posts in ways that have nothing to do with the topic.

My local stage and municipality have subreddits. The state subreddit was taken over by political hacks years ago. The municipality subreddit is getting worse and worse.

There’s no obligation at all to administer a regional subreddit in an inclusive way.

Plenty of folks are making a lot of money out there maintaining an echo chamber (facebook, many politically-aligned news websites on all sides) on the internet, so while I agree that it's maybe not great for society, it does seem to work pretty well for capitalists.

Fox News makes about $12 billion a year off their highly partisan echo chamber.

I was once a moderator at /r/ApplyingToCollege and other college related subreddits. When I started, there were about 20,000 subscribers, and when I left it was in the hundreds of thousands; now it's one of the largest college admissions forums in the world. It was worth it for me to help underprivileged students get high quality information about college and financial aid options, and then see those same students get into excellent colleges. It was quite a lot of work and most moderators on that subreddit did not last more than a year.

Yet if they were paid they’d probably be found wanting from a professional viewpoint.

If they were paid they could be asked to maintain certain standards as conditions of employment that you can't really expect from a volunteer.

Exactly, these people are rejects that end up ranting online because no one will listen to them in real life.

The number cannot possibly be this low

> They found that collectively, the whole Reddit moderator population spends 466 hours per day performing moderating actions on the platform at a minimum.

I agree. 466 hours daily seems at first glance like at least an order of magnitude too low. I would have guessed easily many thousand hours are spent moderating daily.

The study authors did say this was a lower bound.

Are we talking about hours spent vs. minimum wage or the quality of the output?

If the latter i expect it to be magnitudes too high.

Much of this labor is activism, which is why they do it.

They get to control the narrative, to suppress dissent/wrongthink, and to bury inconvenient news.

Unpaid labor is worth what you're paid for it if other people will do it for free. Reddit no more owes a debt to these moderators than you owe the guy who cleans your windshield without permission.

Except you never had any wipers installed because why bother when destitute people will clean your windshield for free. So if they ever stop, your car will crash into the first available wall.

$3.4M/year sounds like a very small amount for Reddit. It's probably worth to pay out the money just to get rid of the bad news like this one.

making moderator a paid position would entirely kill the vibe of a lot of reddit communities.

there's definitely some places where reddit needs more paid moderation, but the volunteer moderator is an essential role.

I wonder if a DAO would be possible, that distributes the ad revenue of a Reddit like system to the moderators of the forums.

Writing the code seems to be not too hard.

Advertisers could send funds to a smart contract which in return gives them a token which enables them to display ads for a certain amount of time.

Each piece of ad revenue could be distributed to the moderators of the forum that generated it.

Would there be any major hurdles for such a DAO to get traction?

You don't need anything close to something that complicated.

I guess you mean a traditional Reddit clone could also pay the mods?

I'm not sure.

1: It is quite a lot of bureaucratic work to set up a business that can pay small amounts to many people around the world.

2: Signing up as a mod would be way more complicated. There would be a KYC processes. A different one for each country. There would be VAT and invoice processes that are different for each country. Some countries could simply not take part. As there are many pairs of countries A and B where A has a law "Business with people from country B is illegal".

3: As a mod, you would always be living in fear that the company that runs the system kicks you out. And all your hard work (maybe of years!) goes down the drain.

4: Earning small amount of fiat money is also very annoying if you do not already have a business. Suddenly you have figure out all the complexities around how do declare taxes. It would probably usually not worth it for mods who are not already running a business.

If doing the world wide paperwork is too hard, then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to grow so large.

Or Reddit could just pay some of their ad money to their mods. They already have all the stats on what ads are displayed where, and a functioning ad system, how is involving a shitty slow energy-wasting database run by a bunch of strangers going to help?

community-owned forums are a social good, it's silly to describe this as a job that reddit should do on their behalf

this is like saying that stopping yourself from eating a donut is worth money to the state because the state pays for healthcare, and would otherwise have to put a cop in your kitchen, and cops make $x/hour, etc

'unpaid cyclists perform labor worth $100mm / year to citibike'

And probably more when you consider the legal shield they provide.

Wikipedia is arguably the most valuable website in existence.

I was thinking the other day about all the posting people do on Twitter for free. It's insane how much work people will put in for such little reward or effort except for internet clout.

I don't understand this post. People do all sorts of things for enjoyment and self-expression. All sorts of communities pop up like poetry slams, pick up sports activities. Like just because Twitter gets value out of it somehow means people shouldn't want to do it? Isn't the ideal business one where people feel like they get equal value out of an exchange?

Some of the more 'successful' of those people end up turning the internet clout into being an influencer which can end up making them a decent amount of money.. but you are right, in the vast majority of cases people won't get anything for the content they contribute to Twitter's platform beyond internet clout

One hyperactive Twitter user even got to be President...but was banned anyways

So what you're saying is

>he does it for free

I've never quite understood why anyone would want to mod the front page subreddits, r/pics, r/funny, r/askreddit etc. It must be a lot of work and your reward for your efforts you get a non-stop stream of abuse from posters who are either pissed off because you're too lazy and let crap content through or pissed off because you're power-hungry and are only letting through posts that support your own personal agenda.

It attracts people with hall-monitor syndrome. Small people who want to feel powerful and important.

EDIT: I'm sure some are paid to astroturf as well.

That may be true but it's a good example of the kind of negativity they face. I suppose it surprises me how much the front page of reddit relies on either wanna-be hall monitors with egos of steel or paid astroturfers who are officially disallowed and are smart enough to hide their motivations.

It seems fragile. If a few hundred people said f*it, would reddit collapse overnight?

The platform problem is that people fails to understand that a platform is someone else services.

With Usenet we are all equal, our "free work" is for ourselves in our community, with platforms it's for the owner.

It's NOT different from some people who fails to understand the difference between a local thing and a remote service, just shifted to less IT illiterate people, unfortunately with the very same mechanism...

Porn is built in. Getting rid of it would Tumblrcide. Let's see how that IPO goes.

As a rule, all moderators suck. This has been true since before http.

> all moderators suck

Most moderators you notice suck. There are a lot of invisible moderators around quietly removing spam and keeping communities free of griefers.

Moderation is cheap. The price the consumer pays for it is having content be removed/filtered/edited because it violates a submission guideline, ToS, or a moderator's worldview. Usually the latter. I don't think you can quantify that value personally. Definitely worth more than a few million dollars for the potential reach.

Every subreddit is also now beginning to just get political, making their job worse.

Majority of frontpage reddits are political subreddits:

/r/whitepeopletwitter

/r/blackpeopletwitter

/r/antiwork

/r/economy (yeah even this now)

/r/workreform

Thankfully the more I browse reddit the more I develop a de-sensitized self to extreme left/right wing. Now I just auto-filter it on my brain. That's a good thing.

I see this very quickly made it's way to the front page, are the HN mods trying to tell us something? /s

Paranoids attack

With flag, vouch and downvoting … HN gets a hand from us.

pretty sure the HN mods get paid?

I expect Reddit or some competitor to eventually create a platform where ad revenue is shared with subreddit/content creators (a bit like YouTube does). It would make a lot of sense.

This is such a one-sided view. The moderators get value, probably in excess of what $3.4MM (if a price could even be put on it), by having a properly running subreddit.

Truth to be told, some mods don't do a stellar job.

They should at least be getting the money from the Gold/Silver/etc awards...

So all of reddit can be moderated by 68 people getting paid $50k/yr?

They are all communist so it works out just fine.

They really do it for free.

he does it for free

he does it for freeeee

Worth to whom?

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