cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/8427191

Depending on volunteers is not sustainable, given the regulatory scrutiny that the company will now face, said Julian Klymochko, CEO of alternative investment solutions firm Accelerate Financial Technologies.

“It’s like relying on unpaid labor when the company has nearly a billion dollars in revenue,” he added. Reddit reported revenue of $804 million in 2023, according to an earlier filing.

    • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      And the moment they recognise it as work, they’re forced to recognise how much work goes into a large subreddit. When I was a r/todayIlearned mod at 1m subscribers, 1/35th of its current userbase, it was a professionalised thing with its own meta subreddits/mod chat channel/scheduled shifts to ensure that there was someone on at all times. r/Askhistorians has to fact check every comment in every thread [*as PhD historians, like the scientific subreddits] or else it’s overwhelmed immediately. 90%+ of the posts on r/modernart were from people who have no idea what that term means despite it being plastered all over the subreddit, and the moment you allow anything made after 1985~ it’s immediately filled with spam. Even at 20-100k subscribers, r/fifthworldproblems had so many low effort posts that it burned out every mod I had trying to decide whether something was both funny and non-referential or not. Doing the job well in any of those subreddits only rewards you with more work while any spurned user is potentially trawling your profile to dox you for removing their post.

      The only way I could see them trying to pull it off is through enshittification. I could see them making users pay a subscription fee either for the reddit account or for individual subreddits, especially as a public company legally bound to maximise quarterly shareholder earnings. The userbase is nuked, mods get a fraction of a pool that amounts to less than minimum wage and no worker protections as independent contractors, and every month brings more things making the website worse.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    I don’t see them shifting to paid mods or offering adequate compensation for the current ones. It’s a 24/7 customer service job for countless little cliques with their own subcultures/agendas/ideological leanings.

    If you flatten that to generic spam removers, automoderator already does that and the website is horrible despite it. If you have official power mods, the guy tasked with censoring all leftist dissent in r/worldnews is also tasked with knowing what modern art is in r/modernart and the ages of anime characters so nobody posts CSAM in those subreddits. If I’m running a subreddit for free and someone else is getting paid to, I’m no longer bothering to. If I’m about to create a subreddit and know reddit will steal it and give it to the censorship squad once it’s large enough, I’m making that on Lemmy instead.

    They built their entire company on the backs of volunteer exploitation and there is no unfucking that without revealing how fragile reddit is.