MY SIDES!
It’s fine to do that kind of work for free for the sake of creating and maintaining a nice community for something you enjoy. It’s like charity work.
The problem is that there’s a big company that’s profiting massively from this ‘charity work’.
You saying a for profit business cannot have volunteers because it’s akin to labor without pay? That’s anti capitalist and pro workers.
Whoa whoa whoa, let’s not get all political on the Marxist Leninist meme community.
Even then, doing charity work while forcing your wife to earn all the money and do all the chores around the house is questionable
Yes. When volunteers work for free to filter the content that reddit owns, reddit’s product becomes more valuable.
At the same time, this is realistically the only way to gain/maintain community for really niche topics. Unfortunately, lemmy is not a thriving place for things like nonograms, low-poly artwork, the artist C418, or Pokemon GO research/infographics.
In retrospect that reminds me of the big controversy with Minecraft back in the day when Mojang just casually revealed they owned bukkit.
They didn’t own bukkit, they took it over and plucked it apart because it was genuinely more popular than their own hosting software.
When I said “they owned bukkit” I didn’t mean they founded it, just that they were at the time of the controversy the owners of bukkit. Them taking it over isn’t mutually exclusive with owning it.
Also the controversy I was referring to was back in the peak of bukkit’s use, and they had owned it for some time before that peak. I’d wager the controversy was a much larger component of the fall of bukkit than them “plucking it apart” considering it was a product they owned and wholly benefited from it being the defacto standard at the time.
Remember me to an old meme
Moderating a subreddit is a choice, not a personal characteristic. Attempting to dilute the meaning of the word by pretending that criticism of moderators is “bigotry” is itself abusive reactionary rhetoric.
Working for free for a large corporation is just sad. What’s even weirder is that this person acknowledges that it is basically a job, but doesn’t mind not getting paid for it. I think most people that spend ridiculous amounts of time working for a big corporation for free don’t have the understanding that it is basically a job.
I hope he seeks help of some kind.
I used to moderate several subs with over 2M subscribers and while being a Digital Janitor can take a lot of time and effort at the end of the day its just volunteer labor and with Reddit in particular it’s volunteer labor to help a commercial entity.
Society would be better off if these kinds of mods would use the time to volunteer at a soup kitchen or something.
If it’s a community you’re passionate about, I don’t see the issue myself.
