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After porn-y protest, Reddit ousted mods; replacing them isn’t simple
(arstechnica.com)
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Finally an article that goes a little further in details about how important good mods are for reddit.
I thought this was pretty poignant too.
That seems an extremely conservative estimate to me. The linked article says:
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.