this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Mods could be paid on a bounty system with salary or clocked hourly higher-tier mods to oversee moderation to prevent scamming. The higher tier mods would be paid more based on traffic with that ad profit sharing model.
Or maintain a flat general rate across the board for all mods ... make it a liveable wage so that it is worth it to everyone.
This way, moderating can't be monetized or gamed to drive nonsense content just to drive up the income of a small group of people. If you award moderation with even more money .... then the whole system eventually becomes generating whatever content, bots and artificial popularity just to make money ... rather than in just maintaining an equal well paid workforce that all work to maintain the service as it is and let the users develop the content based on actual interests and popularity.
But what do I know .... the world is just set up to make money and no amount of common sense will ever be implemented if the whole system is perpetually set up to just award those that can make as much money as possible no matter what.
The bounty mods that are incentivized to act are kept in-check by the salary mods who have a base pay determined by number of bounty mods(which is determined by user metrics) with volume bonuses. The salary mods primary responsibility is oversight and only have incentive to increase traffic, which can be kept in-check by bot limits per active users so the mods can't botfarm base pay or bonuses via traffic metrics.
Bounty mods would be established community members supplementing income, salary mods would be would be established members of the community who had a solid track record as a bounty mod.
Just having low-level mods paid a living wage creates waste or overwork as they either get paid to do almost nothing or have to have multiple subs they maintain, which means less focus. If they have a certain number of subs that they have to maintain, they may not have the interest or knowledge of their subs to effectively mod them.
Higher-tier mods would have the same issues but at a higher pay scale, workload, and cost. Not having a higher-tier mod would mean no oversight for the actions of mods except outside of the sub community with people who don't have an active involvement and understanding of that sub community.
That leaves the actual company to act as oversight and investigate suspicious activity within a sub's numbers which indicates some malfeasance. If the numbers aren't genuine, then that harms the profitability of the company because they are paying more for a salary mod and bounty mod than they rightfully deserve.
What you don't know is how a sustainable and effective business or people work. You can't expect everybody to be honest and hard working withithout adequate compensation driving that and you need limits to keep bad actors in-check or flagged for removal. You can't pay people to do less than the value their labor creates and you cant pay people more than the value they creates, that is inviable due to turnover and unsustainability respectively. An unsustainable business leaves the company to derrive sustainable income via alternative revenue outside of their core business like selling user data and rampant ads, which is harmful to the users(See: Reddit).
Within a few years almost all of reddit's mods would be from China or other 3rd world country.