Reddit's CEO is attacking Reddit moderators, calling them spoiled "landed gentry" who are messing up his service ...
... when in reality Reddit mods do over $3.4 million in free labor annually, as per a recent scholarly estimate
And that's a lowballed, conservative estimate
My essay on it here: https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3-4-million-in-free-labor-every-year-d3571235c32c
A "friend" link in case you're not a Medium subscriber: https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3-4-million-in-free-labor-every-year-d3571235c32c?sk=8526a9c3671885cce45a2bd3d1e36b82
@clive Good essay! And I appreciated the link out to the paper estimating that moderators do 466 person-hours of work per day, I've seen th $3.4 million/year number tossed around a lot and wondered where it came from.
It’s an interesting paper, very readable!
@clive agreed, although since tasks like deliberation that don't show up in the moderator logs and isn't counted in the estimate, it's almost certainly a significant underestimate (or a lower bound, as the authors describe it). I found myself wondering if reddit's thinking "hey no prob, we'll just pay for some of the modeation ourself if necessary, it's less than it costs us to support Apollo et al." If so, good luck with that!
Indeed!
@clive not sure if you've seen @sarahgilbert's excellent paper on intersectional moderation. It'd take more than 466 person-hours a week to apply that approach reddit wide! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.11250.pdf
More positively I think there's a huge potential opportunity here, to bring a strong moderation focus and tooling to support it to the fediverse - kbin and lemmy most obviously, ideally more broadly as well. We shall see.
I’ll check that out, hadn’t seen it – thanks for the pointer!