After porn-y protest, Reddit ousted mods; replacing them isn’t simple

Technology@kbin.social – 117 points – 1 years ago

After porn-y protest, Reddit ousted mods; replacing them isn’t simple

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The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually, and as detailed on the r/hentai subreddit, the work mods do is both complex and extensive. Reddit itself calculated that manual mod removals represented 30.9 percent of content removed in 2022. Reddit would be a different website, one perhaps incapable of functioning, without the tens of thousands of volunteers it uses to keep content safe, enjoyable, relevant, and valuable. Relying on volunteers saves the unprofitable company plenty of money.

I thought this was pretty poignant too.

The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually

That seems an extremely conservative estimate to me. The linked article says:

The team recorded the work done to keep 126 subreddits moderated for an average of 142 days, and analysed automated logs generated whenever the 900 human moderators took an action.

In total, more than 800,000 actions were recorded. Some actions contained full timestamps of when work began and ended; others only contained a single timestamp – for removing a post, say – and so the time taken was estimated at what the researchers believe is a lower bound.

The median amount of time any individual spent working daily is 10 seconds, but the top 10 per cent of moderators spent between 3 and 40 minutes working for Reddit. Two in every three actions were taken by the top 10 per cent of moderators.

There's a major problem with this methodology, which is the assumption that a moderator is not working unless they're taking an action. But that's not the case, is it? Sitting around keeping an eye on things and not doing anything because no action is currently required is still work! Just like a security guard. You pay them for all of the 8 hours they spend watching your stuff every day, not just for the thirty seconds a month spent actually apprehending thieves.

According to this Reddit post, there were over 70K moderators on Reddit six years ago. Even if they were only paid the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and each of them on average only spent fifteen minutes a day keeping an eye on things, it would still cost Reddit almost fifty million dollars annually. And that's based on a number that's six years old, which is certain to have grown a lot since then.

So yeah, Reddit is benefiting from free labor a lot.

Its actually quite disgusting - monetising on top of people doing voluntary work with zero pay.

Welcome to capitalism. The technical term for benefiting from something that someone else paid for is cost externalization.

The fact that Reddit has never managed to turn a profit despite receiving an annual subsidy of (at the very least) tens of millions of dollars in the form of free labor really says something about the competence of its leadership, doesn't it.