this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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The moderator culture in America and probably abroad relies on unemployed people living in their relatives house who get paid nothing but lame perks here and there. That is the bulk of it.
Some people moderate 5+ chat rooms daily without pay.
They are digital slaves. Make no mistake about it. And they somehow have been conditioned to believe it will pay off when it rarely does.
Spez is a shitbag who never did anything but be in the same room with actual important people.
The mods just have to find a new platform that appreciates them. That's why I left reddit, I'm giving them free content and a bunch of Spez's are getting rich off our work.
Then they have the audacity to take away what little we actually had, like the API access. Reddit sucks and the death spiral has begun.
As a final act they will get a bunch of redditors to buy in to their IPO only to see the prices come crashing down while they all hold the bags, and the hedgies get even more of our money. It's a rigged game we cannot win.
Well we win by not paying into the IPO. If no one buys into it it won't be worth very much and then they won't have huge amounts of cash.
Don't you dare compare Reddit mods to slaves. Slaves don't have the option to quit work, mods are doing it by choice.
No, no... slavery, like knitting or moderating a small forum space, is obviously just a hobby, or at worst, a side hustle. It's just a way to grow your personal brand, not the single worst atrocity across all of human history.
... we're volunteers.
Some people do community clubs as a way to kill time with casual acquaintances. I have severe social anxiety so that's not a desirable option. Some people do sports. I'm a cripple. Some people do church shit. I hate hymns and I don't believe in God.
So I moderate. And post.
You both have good points. One interesting aspect is that this volunteer labor is actually contributing to what is making the product valuable in the first place.
You could volunteer to do QA for a software company, or volunteer to clean the floors at a bank, or volunteer to work on an assembly line... And we'd likely criticize those businesses for taking advantage of that labour if it were systemic and widespread.
On the other hand you have open source projects which are freely licensed for huge corporations to make tons of profit from, and all we expect is that they give something back (but we don't even hold them to that).
It's interesting to think about where moderation work sits among these.
The reward for the work is the result of the work. For these communities to exists, there must be moderation and for many people the existence of said communities is worth the cost in time/server costs. Reddit selling stock off the backs of people who perform free labor for them is a problem, but someone who sets up a lemmy/mastodon/whatever to host discussion about the things that they care about is not a slave just because they don't demand monetary compensation or sell your data. The lack of monetization isn't a bug it's a feature.
Thank you for your service
o7
Lol slavery
Frankly outrageous comparison
Nobody is forcing them to do it. If they are unhappy about it they should stop doing it. And preferably come to us not getting paid.
They get paid in moderator power trips. "What did you say? Banning..."
I think some of the mods are power tripping, but when I was a mod on one of the subs I think I only ever banned one person. If somebody else had been prepared to motivate the sub then I'd have been happy to let them do it, but it ended up me me doing it.