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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Management and business continue to treat volunteer moderators like their employees or contractors; which even in the some of the better examples in the corporate world, can be mildly abusive as people need to eat and have families to feed.

You can't treat volunteers like that. You have to keep them happy. You have to treat them with respect. You're not paying them for their free labour.

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I hate the unpaid moderator model, it generally attracts only the most terminally-online busybodies, and they seem completely detached from the core aims of SO, instead only interested in metadrama.

I don't like it on Reddit and I don't like it on SO. They should pay professional moderators just like Twitter and Facebook.

> the core aims of SO

Which are?

A place that gives me answers to common coding questions.

If the place is filled to the brim with GPT-generated nonsense, how do you plan on finding those answers?

I think you've hit on something here.

I understand very well that it is active moderation which keeps SO from being a toilet of spam and junk. At the same time, in my limited experience SO moderators are petty tyrants, very jealously guarding their tiny domains.

> wI understand very well that it is active moderation which keeps SO from being a toilet of spam and junk.

I often wonder about this. I can see how this is true for somewhere like Reddit where lazy memes could overrun any subreddit, but I'm less convinced when it comes to SO. The vast majority of SO moderator actions are on questions that non-mods have already downvoted and reported. These questions could/would be hidden by SO's algorithm anyway. Only new queue lurkers see unpopular questions.

I think that SO's moderation could be almost entirely automated and overseen by a small number of professional paid moderators.

It's not "management and business". People will always tend to take as much as they can before someone fights back.

Only a certain type of person does that. And management and business leaders more often than average are that type.

> People will always tend to take as much as they can before someone fights back.

I don't think that's always the case. People can and do organise themselves in ways that prioritise collaboration over treating these sorts of things as a zero-sum game. Not all orgs have to function in this way.

This is far from universally true.

If this is all you have experienced, then I urge you to look beyond your current circle (or bubble) to find people who genuinely care about others and want to improve the world.

Almost nobody has probably had that as their only experience. However, it only takes relatively few people to do that for thing to turn sour -- sometimes a single person is enough. And in a large enough circle, chances are someone is like that.

Since most people tend to avoid confrontation, that gives the kinds of people who want to take as much as they can (or to have their way in some other way) a free pass until someone does in fact fight back.

Hence it's not surprising if, in the big picture, it seems like "people" (as in enough of them to make it a potential issue) do in fact seem to behave that way.

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