I am insufficiently familiar with the feudalism metaphor to claim it doesn't break down, but on a cursory glance, it seems to hold up.
Or are they naive chumps with too much time on their hands, tricked into doing free labour for a big corporation that actively disdains them?
I always thought the people manipulating opinion on social media were using bot accounts, rather than moderator positions.
So the only possible result, because the assumption is that nobody does anything is that isn’t selfishly compensated, is that there MUST be a psychic - non-priced - selfish benefit to the user. That might be true but I’m not sure that you can use those interchangeably because the latter has no pricing mechanism.
Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.
No, I actually think that there’s another organizational structure here that we’ve just not seen or have a name for. Namely it’s where volunteers provide labor for privately owned property, have some control over said property but receive zero of the excess economic value produced by the mix of property holder and labor.
Procedurally: 1. Reddit the organization fronts some amount of capital to provide the platform
2. Volunteers then stake claim to manage and curate limited sub-properties (sub reddits)
3. Reddit the organization sells advertisement placement within the volunteer properties - completely separate from and without the collaboration with subreddit moderators
4. Reddit then keeps 100% of the advertising dollars and zero go to the moderators (or for that matter active members who arguably make the bulk of valuable contributions via content that drive revenue)
Contributions to “open source” that are not on publicly distributable licenses would fall into this category also.
Note here, I’m not using this particular point to complain about the structure - even though I believe it’s not a good structure. I’m simply pointing out that this is a structure that exists for which we don’t really have a coherent understanding of in my opinion
> Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.
If Reddit came to you and tried to charge you to keep the subreddit running at all – as in, it'd be deleted from the web if the mods didn't pay – would that change the answer here? I have this suspicion that – for at least some smaller subs – it would.
And for bigger ones, I would guess mods might not... perhaps because they guess Reddit is already making enough ad money off their work for that exchange to seem unfair.
Only speaking for myself and not the rest of the mod team but I would still say no