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Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

> [Reddit] relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate.

I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article[1] that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount. It’s at most 30 first-world full-time employees (and even that is a huge stretch) or 4e-3 $/MAU/yr (per a 2021 estimate of 900M monthly active users I picked from search results at random). It feels too small to even pay for the maintenance of the third-party mod tools, let alone the actual (far more numerous) moderators.

Does this number seem plausible to anyone with actual domain knowledge?

[1] https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3...

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https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318/1909...

Here's the study with methodology and whatnot. I agree it seems a bit low

It's going to be a lot more I'd think. Also remember that those mods are so dedicated and productive that they'll do it for free. How much would Reddit need to pay for for this level of moderation?

How would you even reach some of those people? I'm pretty sure some of them have very specialized domain knowledge and already have full time paid jobs. They aren't in it for the money.

Reddit risking throwing all that away is shows an absurd and extraordinary level of ignorance.

$3.4 million is a not even funny bad napkin mathematics. Just thinking of the work done by the moderators of /r/science, /r/AskScience, or /r/AskHistorians, not to speak of the moderators that handle celebrities AMA [1], and even $300 million would be a low amount if the platform really cared about the ones that make sure the platform is not a steaming pile of poppycock.

[1] "The Reddit moderators who coordinate many celebrity AMAs will no longer do so", https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781306/reddit-moderators...

You're making the mistake of assuming that 100% of the unpaid work performed by a few niche subreddits converts to equivalent wages on the free labour market.

Is anyone going to pay first-world wages for someone to moderate a subreddit? It doesn't seem like anyone is willing to do so, because the mods do it for free. Nobody is willing to pay for this service. Social media companies that do pay for moderators tend to pay them not well at all. It's not a great job. It burns people out. It is in fact entry-level no-experience-needed grunt work.

Your calculations are vastly over-inflated.

The caveat was "if the platform really cared". For instance, if I was running a platform that had such an interesting (and important, one might argue) social phenomenon as the Ask Me Anything of celebrities or of vacuum repair techs [1] reaching 22+ million people I would pay the ones doing the work way beyond the equivalent wages of "free labour market". But what do I know, I generally regard exploitation as bad and social media companies as a scourge.

[1] Famous AMA, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/adiidz/iama_reddits_o...

Some moderators have public personas which are valuable to a community, have built up trust, have specific hard to find skills, contribute valuable content, etc. If a moderator (or set of moderators) are able and willing to move a community, the market price of their work is the greater of what Reddit is willing to pay them and how much revenue they can receive from moving their community and capitalizing on it themselves.

Your idea of what a "first-world employee" makes is extremely optimistic.

Costs of employment is higher than just wages paid.

Roughly 30% higher when you account for benefits and taxes. This is a significant number for SMBs but insignificant for for a hyper scale tech company.

Sure, but the figure quoted would be over 100k.

That's definitely not what companies have to pay to employ someone for, say, $30k/yr.

> $30k vs $100k

Multiply mananaysiempre's figure by three and the result remains surprisingly small. 90 paid moderators isn't much at all.

>> [Reddit] relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate.

>I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount.

It is absolutely not a vast amount.

A single mod's actual worth is "$175K" per year <https://np.reddit.com/r/35orquit/comments/qw1v3e/what_do_peo...>, according to one mod.

(Be sure to read to the end, where he explains how he "saves lives".)

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