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Comment by matthewowen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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