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Comment by downrightmike | Hacker News Reader

He could just pay mods, which would be fair as he is profiteering from their labor.

I don't think any mods care about making money off this, and that's fine. They do it because they love a tv show, hobby or (in my case) city.

All he needs to do is... not despise the people who his company is built on.

I read a comment on one of the many other threads over the last week that paying moderators changes Reddit's liability under section 230 to be stricter. With volunteer moderators, the mods themselves are considered users instead of employees of the company and that apparently matters in a tangible sense.

Trying to find the comment since I'm not the expert who was mentioning, but it's likely not that easy/why they haven't just done this already, not counting the extra cost.

I'm not sure why them being employees would change their liability since section 230 was explicitly set up to protect moderation decisions by the host. As long as the content is created by third parties and they aren't the ones creating the content, they should be protected.

Edit: Were you referring to this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36320043

Still haven't found the comment! I'm no lawyer, but iirc it was that paid moderators making content approvals would end up turning them into publishers, where bc they're volunteers they're currently 3rd parties to Reddit, so if they approve illegal content now it can't hurt Reddit because of section 230.

Basically because mods don't just remove, but they approve content, paying them as 1st parties gets you into risky "publisher" territory.

edit: YOU FOUND IT. thank you!! your search-fu is a long lock of hair and mine is but an eyelash

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

That comment is misinformation. Moderating your website, whether through volunteers or paid moderators, does not change your liability under Section 230.

Pro tip: if you ever see a comment about Section 230 using the terms "publisher"/"platform", there's a 99.9% chance it is wrong and repeating one of several common misconceptions.

The article you linked quite literally says:

> There may be situations in which a court decides that those protections do not apply to a given piece of content

Which is all someone needs to lose, is section 230 protections over 1 piece of content, to lose a defamation lawsuit about that piece of content - which is what the comment I was linked was discussing. Seems pretty apt to me?

All of the other conversations about moderation in that article apply to removing content. Reddit moderators often review and approve flagged and auto-removed content, making it available on the site by their actions; I believe the commenter I paraphrased was saying that that action crosses the line into content creation, which even your article says introduces liability for bad content.

That's a fair point about the publisher/platform thing - the original comment was talking about literal newspaper publishers as an analogue of a content creator under section 230. I just plucked the word publisher and ran with it thinking it was a meaningful term wrt the law!

Good read.

edit: Either way though that commenter said the law hasn't been decided by court case around this question yet so it's all hypothetical!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com