Reddit moderators do $3.4M worth of unpaid work each year | Hacker News Reader

Reddit moderators do $3.4M worth of unpaid work each year

newscientist.com

26 pointsgmays11 comments

I'm not sure this is really 'paid' work in any meaningful way. Most Reddit moderators are upholding community standards, enforcing subreddit rules etc.

The fact that the community is online doesn't automatically mean it should be paid. My step-dad runs a bowls club, he enforces the rules, manages a (modest) budget for the club, and schedules matches, etc., all without pay. I don't think he'd try to say this is 'work', it's his hobby, and I doubt the idea of trying to take a salary for it has even crossed his mind.

Same for Reddit moderators - they're volunteers who take part in managing a community they care about because they enjoy it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the various festivals in my country were lamenting about not getting enough volunteers - compared to the pre-COVID years. Apparently teens and young adults just aren't up to do as much free work, as they used to.

Someone mentioned that they're probably too busy with paid work during their summer vacations, as they can barely afford to do anything at all with their paltry student loans or side-income during school.

Mind you, these festivals are commercial entities with the goal of making money.

Same goes for "community-driven" sites like Reddit. Reddit (or their owners) are in it to make money - and no small part of that is due to tireless free labor. The day old.reddit disappears, I'm jumping ship

Reddit is free to use, and subreddit moderators are largely free to set their own rules for their little club, and can spend as much or as little time as they like enforcing them.

No-one is exploiting 'free labour' here - the service Reddit offers is essentially a bulletin board hosting service, and they offer it free of charge (although yes, they do monetise it in other ways).

Festivals (at least in my country) used to offer tickets in exchange for work, so again, I wouldn't really call it 'free' work. If you don't want to work for your ticket, you can buy it with money. Not sure that's a great proposition though, because a camping ticket to Download (a popular rock festival in the UK) costs about the same as 40 hours' work at the minimum wage for an 18-20 year old.

Is that total? Or an average per moderator? The article doesn't really make that clear, and yet that makes a pretty massive difference.

If it was average per moderator, I'm pretty sure the article would attracted more eyeballs with the headline $3.4m each, or $3.4m x N ( $3+ billion with n=900 ) moderators.

Also in the first line below the header "$3.4m... labour that would cost 2.8 per cent of the firm’s revenue". The study analyzed the work of 900 moderators, so there is likely more moderators on the platform. But as a lower bound, 900 moderators * $3.4 million * 100 / 2.8 would mean $110 billion in revenue. Reddit's last funding round was at a $10 billion valuation, so I leave it to you to decide if $110 billion in revenue makes sense.

There are probably thousands or tens of thousands of moderators on reddit. Obviously it's not 3.4mm per moderator.

I love the idea of randomly billing corporations for my online 'work' based on arbitrary hourly rates. For example I've reviewed a few places on Google Maps. Based on the methodology used for this, I can apparently just charge $20/hr to Google for my work.

Do you not generate any value by providing data to google maps? You are making google maps better when you do it. Why does google get to benefit from your work? Its clearly not reasonable for everyone to demand payment for this type of work, but I think its worth questioning why we let huge companies build products that require this kind of donated labor

You have the cart before the horse here.

OP receives value from Google Maps for free. For whatever private reasons they may have, they decide to give value back for free[]. OP is under no obligation to 'donate labour'.

[] Assumption is here that there's no 'value exchange', and OP's contribution is not directly related to value they get out of Maps. (as opposed to private bittorrent trackers which maintain an upload ratio requirement etc.)

Google sells ads on google maps. Users are as much of a product as the directions.

I've never claimed anyone is under an obligation to donate their labor, I pointed out that it is work and some companies are earning profits from products that require this type of unpaid work to function

If Google removed all social functionality and user contribution possibilities from Maps, then they'd still be able to monetise it through ads and users would still be the product, so that's not really relevant to the discussion.

I would argue that the product does not require unpaid work to function. The other question is whether OP providing reviews to Google is a) really work, and b) really unpaid.

I think there are good arguments it's not 'work' (although this is more of a question of semantics), but there are very strong arguments it's not unpaid. Obviously there's no exchange of money, but Google offer a platform for reviewers to share their thoughts and ideas with an audience.

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