this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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So what, give the CEO half and pay the rest to the mods? Like 1300 bucks per year without tax and fees. What would be left? 50 bucks per month? Reddit has like 75000 moderators. Some for huge Subreddits, some for small ones. Equal pay? Or what?
Someone has to organize all that paying, many are in different countries, different tax laws. In the end, there would be like 20 bucks per month for each. You then would also require extra heavy checks for moderation quality to ensure they are worth their pay. You'd need systems to prevent abuse. If there's money involved, people become extra greedy. Just pay some of them? Only the ones working a few hours per day? Pay per moderating action? What?
Or you just do double pay for the CEO. Seems like a no-brainer.
"paying people who create value for your company is too complicated to worry about" is a weird justification
It is a no brainier in the complete opposite direction you proposed
…or you invest the money in actually making your platform decent and adding features mods have been asking for years. But then big number doesn’t go up so it’s a bad idea I guess.
I guess I would also answer that with controversial opinion.
They don't want a better platform. Reddit does exactly what they want it to do. To generate tons of discussions about the same things, over and over again. To generate loads of different feelings and situations. To create a very diverse pool of data.
They might have started out with a good ideology, but then success came.
I like to compare it with Quora. It could have been the best site of its kind. But it served its purpose, being a feed-bucket for an AI, and now it's not even moderated anymore. And they did pay their users and mods, but it didn't work out, too many tiny transactions, only like a handful of people got anything, and those abused it like crazy.
Just my take on it. Such payment models won't work. A few giants will earn the majority, and they will cheat and fight for it, the rest will still get nothing. They could have taken three thirds of that CEO money to create a few resident jobs. But why bother, Reddit is exactly how they want it to be. Most users just don't realize the pseudo-scam, believing it's their favorite discussion platform that they can influence, while the creators have a content-generator with free labor in mind.