I wrote this last week - thinking about some technological solutions. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272935)
Trying to get a sense of how the community thinks about it from a product or policy perspective.
How should we think about this?
Also Reddit itself has a built in moderating system with the upvote/downvote system and the "new" section.
Mods highly overrate their contribution to reddit. The truth is the site will run fine whether they stay or get replaced and the mods know this.
Imagine if you're the moderator of a subreddit like /r/politics. You might not get a steady corporate paycheck, but you effectively get global political influence and power and probably more than a dozen serious offers by corporations, politicians, and likely even nation-states to not block/ban their spam of products/services/propaganda on that subreddit daily.
Naive answer is a percentage of monthly advertising or subscription revenue, split amongst the moderators based on the proportion of the moderation work they have undertaken.
However, this creates a perverse incentive for moderators to perform unnecessary additional moderation work to bring in more compensation.
have you looked at lobsters moderation log?
having this open could potentially reduce the perverse incentive.
if they had a way to truly own their community and for the community to show their appreciation - it would def make them feel more valued.
no one will reject “donations” of course.
wondered how crowd sourcing a side income would look like - similar to the creator economy.
eg: ad revenue made on a subreddit - split with mods.
Send thank you cards, annual gifts, maybe some sort of exclusive-ish discount program (a lot of corporations get employee discounts to large advertisers, maybe you could extend that to moderators at some minimum level of effort)
Maybe some token stock grants, if you can find a way to make that not a giant hassle.