Reddit mods discuss forming a union and suing for back pay | Hacker News Reader

Reddit mods discuss forming a union and suing for back pay

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17 pointsTMWNN16 comments

This just shows Steve Huffman's incompetence and lack of foresight as CEO. It seems he only noticed the mods depend on 3rd party apps after the API price announcement. He should have implemented the announced moderation tools first and then kill the API.

reddit was hiring about a year ago for their "developer platform", I talked to one of their recruiters. I inevitably passed on the interview process because they did not seem like they had their shit together.

It's possible that they monumentally fucked up timelines here but committed anyway due to some ephemeral IPO plan.

I have heard, but cannot confirm, that elsewhere in /r/modcoord there is a discussion of how $125K is the worth of a Reddit mod's work.

I can confirm that last year a Reddit mod estimated that his work is worth $175K because he saves lives <https://np.reddit.com/r/35orquit/comments/qw1v3e/what_do_peo...>. Be sure to read to the end, where he explains how he "saves lives".

This is no longer about third party apps, if it ever was. It's about mods learning where they fit within the site's power structure, and not being happy about it.

Was there some kind of performance contract that moderators signed or is this asking for a pony? I would have thought nothing was ever written down or even verbally implied, but what do I know.

Like offering “exposure” when asking a band to play your bar…

The very fact that they do it for free shows the value of their work - it is zero.

If they really were the garbagemen of the Internet they’d be paid accordingly.

But they get paid in power and influence which is what they want (and got).

Well put, there will always be people willing to do this for free, so the value is actually $0.

I don’t like power tripping mods either but in the face of a soon to be a publicly traded company that statement smells.

They got groomed into doing stuff for free for a medal or badge and we think it’s fine?

They knew exactly what they were doing/getting into. Nobody got groomed into doing anything, and certainly nobody was forced to be a mod.

This is just incorrect. Doing something for free is not the same as the work having zero value. Are you claiming the value of the work of all volunteers is zero? Is the value of donated blood zero? Does open source software have zero value?

Let’s assume you mean that they don’t deserve to get paid because they’ve been doing it for free. That don’t make any sense either. Most people have done things that they could have or should have gotten paid for. Opinions change, their demands can change. They have a skill, and they want to be compensated for it. If this was a solved technological problem, we wouldn’t have mods in the first place.

Don’t confuse value and cost. One of those is much more flexible than the other.

There's a youtube guy who goes around and landscapes people's yards for free. He does good work; it's a valuable service. But if he later returned to the house and demanded payment he wouldn't have a leg to stand on. That would be the same leg that the Reddit mods are missing.

It's not like they are asking to be paid for the 15 years they have been doing work for free, just starting now.

The equivalent here would be to say that the guy has to do any landscaping for free from now on as he has done it for free before.

That’s fine. Ans the mods who want pay now can just loose their modship. It’s not their site. Not their servers and are owed nothing.

Mods have always been abusive and used their outweighed power to push their political agendas. It’s time they got a taste of their own medicine

You can't paint all mods with the same brush. For every vocal "power mod" that would fall into the category you describe, there are probably 10 mods of communities that you've never heard of, who are vital to their community's success, who would disagree with your statement.

Reddit forgets that it has the position it does solely because of the community. Without the content provided by users (and managed by mods), Reddit would be an empty husk. It always irks me when people talk about who "owns" Reddit. I'll use myself as a counterexample. I founded a small rhythm game modding community about six years ago. I created it, I named it, I ran it by myself for a couple of years before it actually became somewhat popular. There was a pivotal moment where two separate things happened to greatly increase our reach. As a few of the members rose to prominence with their contributions to the community, I brought them in as moderators and later administrators. Now, I could have maintained my "boss man" position, I could have looked at the community as "mine", but I chose not to. I made them equal administrators to myself, and I stopped making unilateral decisions as to how things would work. I did this in recognition of the fact that, without their contributions, "my" community would be nothing. The community is bigger than me, and that's ok.

Reddit is the same way. Without the moderators and users of the site, Reddit would be nothing. Throwing your e-peen around and smacking everyone in the face with it "because it's your site" is a very arrogant decision, one that ignores the role users and moderators have played in the site's success. All to chase the almighty dollar.

Reddit seems to have forgotten the lesson they originally gave Digg. No matter, Reddit will eventually be irrelevant, just like every such UGC-driven site that loses sight of how they got where they are. Reddit's no Facebook, in terms of sheer resistance to this due to size, and they never will be if they keep it up.

>There's a youtube guy who goes around and landscapes people's yards for free. He does good work; it's a valuable service. But if he later returned to the house and demanded payment he wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

What you are describing doesn't sound free though. It sounds like in consideration for media and film rights - the compensation - the property owners get a service. It's like Extreme Home Makeover was done for 'free' for homeowners but was not remotely free in that was a broadcast cable show that people assigned certain rights to in consideration for 'free' work.

>That would be the same leg that the Reddit mods are missing.

There isn't exactly a bright line as to when someone should be considered a paid employee or not, but just with your own example, if that 'YouTube guy' was filming and profiting off the videos he made without releases from the homeowners he himself could be sued where it would be that he could owe the property owners, which is not a remotely applicable situation to Reddit moderators. If film, TV, commercials, etc are done on someone's property that's a whole different thing from employment law.

As someone who dislikes most parts of Reddit, good riddance. As someone who dislikes powertripping mods on internet forums, also good riddance.

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