Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

Good.

Reddit needs to convert their model to financially compensate moderators of subreddits based on the revenue ads on that subreddit generate.

In return, moderators need to re-agree to a set of terms that align their incentives towards being impartial and fair towards the users of those subs.

Mods who agree could stand to make good side-hustle money (maybe even full time job money), and Reddit could obtain a method for showing their future shareholders that they're in control of the revenue channel.

Could run this program out of a spreadsheet until the code gets written to automate, and IMO this is important enough to pay the lawyers and accountants to figure out the details.

YouTube does this, Twitch does this... it's absolutely feasible, and everybody wins.

Hell, if you want to be tricky, you could set up some kind of currency market (probably avoid crypto but if ever there was a legit use for it...) that mods get paid in that they then sell to advertisers for space on their respective subreddits where Reddit gets a cut (I assume this resolves some amount of the labor/employment issues, but IANAL), but that's something you do after you put out the fire.

In return, moderators need to re-agree to a set of terms that align their incentives towards being impartial and fair towards the users of those subs.

There is no objective standard of "impartial and fair", but is that even necessary for your proposal? Different people want different moderation standards, but that seems fine.

Fair enough, my point is more broadly that some standard would need to apply a la Twitch/YouTube/etc. You can't be racist, you can't credibly threaten people, and so on.

Turning moderators into content creators (content curators) and connecting them more directly to their advertisers is the general idea.

I disagree. Should the Rust subreddit allow posts for the game rust? Would it not be unfair to remove them?

This applies to anything and everything. Subreddits were great because they could set whatever rules they wanted and you could just leave if you did not like it.

Er, it has never been true that subreddits could set whatever rules they want. Many subreddits have been banned for a myriad of reasons, nothing should or would change w/r/t that.

uh what? subreddits can and do set any rules they want within the global reddit terms of service. Subreddits have been banned for breaking global reddit rules.

Up until this very recent fiasco, those rules were much more lax.

> within the global reddit terms of service.

Uh huh...

Reddit has often banned subreddits and made rules afterwards. A few subreddits don't really break any rules but are unseemly so get quarantined or if small enough banned anyway.

It's difficult to envision that being a fair and impartial role. If the photography sub is sponsored by Canon, that's putting moderators into a weird position of being sort of content creators, sort of employees with conflicts of interest. The difference between Twitch/YouTube and reddit is that reddit's more of a conversation than the video platforms that distribute content. Ads tied directly to the performance of the subreddit, and the mods depending on that performance, undermines that distinction. Editorial and sales need to be kept separate for it to continue to be useful as a forum.

Integrity arguments take a strong backseat to profitability arguments anyway; either they're entangled and the best thing for moderators and Reddit to do would be to act ethically, or they're not entangled at all and blocking pics from non-Canon cameras is the most profitable thing for everyone, as it retains/grows the most users.

Either way, Reddit provides value to users, because user retention is how Reddit makes money. Now, mods are also incentivized to retain users, rather than the current disconnect where a mod is actively disincentivized to retain users, given the additional burden users create for mods.

> In return, moderators need to re-agree to a set of terms that align their incentives towards being impartial and fair towards the users of those subs.

This will never happen. Reddit already makes rules that are not impartial or fair towards users. If they pay the mods the mods will only work to serve reddit (and therefore reddit's advertisers) not users.

It's about incentives. Right now, mods and Reddit have very different goals. When you tie moderator compensation to subreddit financial success, suddenly the incentives are now aligned towards maximizing the number of eyeballs on a given subreddit, because eyeballs mean conversions and conversions mean revenue, and revenue means happy shareholders, moderators.

As for the users, we could debate all day what's best for them, but the war between mods and Reddit would be over, and that's incredibly good for users.

You do realize that Reddit runs in the negative? No chance they do this

This would not meaningfully impact profitability for Reddit, the payouts need not be “large” from Reddit’s perspective to be a substantial amount of money to individual moderators.

Only one person has said they run in the negatives and they’ve said it alongside a host of other lies, so please forgive the less trusting of us for not believing the serial liar.

Reddit was profitable until they hired thousands more employees for very little obvious gain.

Gotta grow fast to inflate the value to astronomical levels and then sell out. Who cares what happens after that point.

>Reddit needs to convert their model to financially compensate moderators of subreddits based on the revenue ads on that subreddit generate.

No, that's absurd. Plenty of people would become moderators for free. Yes, for free. And plenty of them would be better mods than current mods.

Mods provide less value than you think.

Most of the value was essentially being the first to register the name of the subreddit.

As long as incentives are not aligned, Reddit will continue to have mod problems, which will spook shareholders.

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