Why do you free work for a for-profit social network, especially if you say yourself that the work negatively impacts your mental health and that the community you are moderating is toxic?
What are you getting out of this?
What are you getting out of this?
They don't. They do the work for a community they're part of. The social network hosts that community, and tries to make a profit doing so.
I organise a meetup that's held in a pub (well, not at the moment). People coming to the meetup spend money on the pub's beer and pizza. Am i doing free work for a for-profit public house?
It's not your intent to do work and it's probably not the pub owners desire to pay for meetup organizers, but regardless of your and the pub owner's intent, work has happened.
You may as well ask why people volunteer their time at all.
Benefitting from socializing is not worth the reddit moderator role is my opinion, under the psychological load they operate in.
It's fair that both parties feel like they're benefiting, so no direct transaction needs to occur.
Comparing this to volunteering generally isn't the same. I volunteer with local registered charities because I believe in their mission, and the volunteer work I do is directly impacting and improving the lives of the people I'm working with.
Which may be the crux of the GP's question. Why volunteer in the community in a way that results in a for-profit organisation monetising you for their gain, instead of finding a non-profit in your community to be volunteering your time towards? The non-profit / charity in your community's goals are more likely to be aligned with your own, than the for-profit social network.
A moderator’s work primarily benefits, directly, the users, because it allows them to communicate safely. The platform only gets help indirectly.
Charities often have salaried or reimbursed employees; do you volunteer in order to get their salary paid? Of course not, you do it because it helps actual users; the fact that this allows people to get paid, somehow, is an indirect benefit. Same here, really.
If the charity started stalking me to sell my data onto advertisers in order to pay the salaried staff or other stakeholders more money, I'd stop doing any work through them.
The charity's mission is not maximising revenue / profits.
Any VC/PE backed corporation's mission is to maximise revenue / profits at any cost.
A reddit moderator's free time and a toxic community is a net negative for a moderator, payment may offset the health cost.
It's one thing to organize a bake sale in a public park, but when you choose one pub over other competitors, and they profit from it, you're doing work for the pub for free.
This is why experienced community managers works with businesses to get prices for the event discounted, or set up an agreement for profits to go towards the event.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear, this point is not directed at friendlybus, but to the general sentiment upthread (e.g. ramphastidae) that seems to assume that because reddit is benefiting from the existence of the community therefore the community cannot benefit from the existence of reddit. The underlying reason why is because individuals benefit from the community.
Also I would question if reddit actually makes much profit from individual communities like r/relationshipadvice, especially compared to the pub scenario which I find generally acceptable.
The option is to do "work for free" or to shell out hundreds of dollars.
The same will, and should, happen to Reddit. One of the largest sites on the Internet is making money hand over first while moderators end up paying the price for no real benefit.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
a) prevents people who want to be mods, from being mods
b) breaks the way the site works
What gives you the right to do that? Seriously, if you want to live in a nanny state, please, not in my back yard.
I do not want you to be my nanny.
Reddit's moderation problems are not so big that you are justified in putting a gun to other peoples' faces to force them to do it the way you want.
The Fair Labor Standards Act: https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp
Reddit's preference of exploiting unpaid labor, and it's failure to plan for the inevitable event where that exploited labor decides they want to be compensated for their work is entirely on Reddit Inc. A company valued at $3 billion should have understood the potential risk.
All Reddit mods who feel burned out or are otherwise struggling because of the work they've done as mods should file a complaint with the Dept. of Labor and request financial compensation for the work performed, and coverage of any medical treatment stemming from the results of moderating toxic communities.
Yes. Unequivocally, yes. If I were the owner of X thing and Y person was sending lots of people my way I would be more than happy to give Y person something in return. In your example I would offer free pizza and beer at the absolute minimum. You are selling yourself short.
I don’t get it for relationship subreddits because it’s so mentally exhausting but for fandoms and niche communities the experience is super cool.
It's certainly volunteering in the synonymous sense of 'doing something for nothing because you can' but I feel this statement-left in the vacuous state of its own brevity-comes loaded with an unsaid implication that "volunteering" on Reddit is no different than "volunteering" in one's local community and I'm not sure it's that simple.
It does feel just as limited of a definition of 'volunteering' if taking the grandparent comment at face value.
moderators should be volunteers from that community either way, not paid outsiders.
I mean, I've done internships, but the quid-pro-quo there was quite clear.
E.g., I did a quality improvement internship at a hospital to get a job in quality improvement there, once upon a time. It was "unpaid," but it was an audition for a job that I wanted.
As opposed to my time as a volunteer in a local free clinic, where no benefit accrued to me at all.
I've volunteered at all sorts of community centers, schools, etc... Never once at a for-profit business in town.
In your analogy reddit is the property owner or landlord of the community center, but it does not operate the community center, so volunteers are necessary.
Not the OP, but most people just want to help a community that they are a part of and take a hand in making it better and helping members of the community.
You have to remember, this issue is played on pretty much every online community that has likely ever existed, in some form or another. Long before the term "social network" became used.
But at the end of the day, you need moderators. And the job sucks and is unpaid, so you can't exactly select only the "perfect" candidates.
Being the invisible hand that shapes the narrative of an entire community to one that you see fit is surely an alluring power. Especially if you think the powers of that influence will grow over time.
It's not crazy to assume that a portion of them are in it for the power. People love positions of minor authority. See: the fragmented history and (hilarious) mod power struggle that led to Seattle now having a bunch of differently managed subreddits.
For a nontrivial number of people, this community is the only place to turn. If we step away, do people incur harm as a result?
Most likely.
(in other words, it's almost a psychological obligation of sorts at this point)