I was a mod for a community that had maybe one post every month. It got engagement every time, but there weren’t many posts. I never had anything unpleasant to deal with. I sure wouldn’t expect pay for that.
But the big subs with hundreds of thousands or millions of users? That’s a full time job for a team of 30 people basically.
Every single thread has alerts for a mod to come look at some comment or the post itself. You either ignore it and risk it becoming an issue, or you take care of it.
They deserve more pay than the guys who sit behind desks snorting coke to make big decisions like “let’s completely rework the look and force everyone to use it by default”
Yeah, I was the sole mod of a “mid sized” community of around 50,000 for several years. It took maybe 10 minutes or less of “work” in an entire week. For the vast majority of communities, even ones with a few hundred thousand subscribers, it simply does not take that much effort to filter out bad posts and handle reports and similar.
On the flip side, I have personally communicated with a decent deal of mods of major subs like news, politics, twoxchromosomes, etc. and in my experience it’s these subs that tend to get the… stranger dynamics, where a disproportionate amount of the mod team are people who have WFH jobs with essentially no actual workload, they’re stay at home disabled, they’re a NEET in some capacity (or maybe like, going to college but only taking a class or two a semester). Other subs like askscience revolve almost exclusively around discord channels with hundreds of “sub mods” who get together and kind of randomly review content and basically approve it on a lottery system.
So without being too sympathetic I almost get the CEO from a purely business standpoint. I genuinely cannot figure out a way that you would pay some mods at a rate “equal” to their workload, and how doing so would in any way make the site better and not completely fuck things up where people are now exploiting the payment system for profit without actually contributing to the site.
I’m fairly cynical and think that many (perhaps even most) do it for that little shred of power. But some do it out of genuine passion for a project. I’d be more inclined to suspect the former for controversial topics and anything political, and the latter for subs that are related to fun topics and hobbies.
Some people really just like flexing whatever Tiny Iota of power they can get and mod positions are perfect for them, at least until they mildly disagree with someone who is either in the right or at least just has a differing opinion.
I was a mod for a community that had maybe one post every month. It got engagement every time, but there weren’t many posts. I never had anything unpleasant to deal with. I sure wouldn’t expect pay for that.
But the big subs with hundreds of thousands or millions of users? That’s a full time job for a team of 30 people basically.
Every single thread has alerts for a mod to come look at some comment or the post itself. You either ignore it and risk it becoming an issue, or you take care of it.
They deserve more pay than the guys who sit behind desks snorting coke to make big decisions like “let’s completely rework the look and force everyone to use it by default”
Yeah, I was the sole mod of a “mid sized” community of around 50,000 for several years. It took maybe 10 minutes or less of “work” in an entire week. For the vast majority of communities, even ones with a few hundred thousand subscribers, it simply does not take that much effort to filter out bad posts and handle reports and similar.
On the flip side, I have personally communicated with a decent deal of mods of major subs like news, politics, twoxchromosomes, etc. and in my experience it’s these subs that tend to get the… stranger dynamics, where a disproportionate amount of the mod team are people who have WFH jobs with essentially no actual workload, they’re stay at home disabled, they’re a NEET in some capacity (or maybe like, going to college but only taking a class or two a semester). Other subs like askscience revolve almost exclusively around discord channels with hundreds of “sub mods” who get together and kind of randomly review content and basically approve it on a lottery system.
So without being too sympathetic I almost get the CEO from a purely business standpoint. I genuinely cannot figure out a way that you would pay some mods at a rate “equal” to their workload, and how doing so would in any way make the site better and not completely fuck things up where people are now exploiting the payment system for profit without actually contributing to the site.
A full time job they volunteer for because being a mod makes them feel special.
I’m fairly cynical and think that many (perhaps even most) do it for that little shred of power. But some do it out of genuine passion for a project. I’d be more inclined to suspect the former for controversial topics and anything political, and the latter for subs that are related to fun topics and hobbies.
Of course, but that kind of person already left reddit, or should have
Some people really just like flexing whatever Tiny Iota of power they can get and mod positions are perfect for them, at least until they mildly disagree with someone who is either in the right or at least just has a differing opinion.