That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
“That’s why we’ve spent the past few weeks threatening and strong arming them. Now please, shut up and get back to work.”
Also: we’re still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting… we’re going to have to replace you with PAID moderators… and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh… shut up and get back to work for free!
If they’re that important then pay them.
If the company is treating you as an employee, they are required to pay you. There is precedent for this.
You think those “open or else” threats are taking Reddit closer to that conclusion?
The TOS definitely gives them quite a lot of leeway there. While TOS obviously don’t supersede actual law, if unpaid internships that are clearly doing actual labor are generally allowed to exist, I’m skeptical that what is explicitly called a volunteer moderator position would run afoul of the law.
One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:
There’s nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there’d just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there’d be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I’m just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don’t think the volunteer model wasn’t working. It’s the admin layer outside the mods that’s broken.
Wikipedia is proof that volunteers are very useful. But when you build a site like that, is better to keep your profit obsession low, be glad you are leaving something useful for humanity while living a comfortable life.
Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone
The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money
But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?
Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)
When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work
Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.
True, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to become mods, even with no pay and awful administration.
I’d dare say that reddit cannot survive without its content!
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite works great for backing up, then editing, then deleting your content from reddit.
I’ve used it on a few of my accounts and I’ve noticed the following:
- You have to baby sit it as occasionally it’ll display an error box you have to click on.
- You definitely have to run it a few times, across a few days, to catch everything.
It seems that (at least for my accounts, keep in mind) you have to edit the comment, then delete it. That way spez’ world of woe backs up the edit, not the comment.
EDIT: Oh! It’s a javascript that runs from the old site so it can be a bit funky at times. With macOS and Safari I’ve (as instructed) added the link to my bookmarks and sometimes I need to click it a couple of times before the UI comes up.
