this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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If they’re that important then pay them.
One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:
Yeah I was a mod. I didn’t want pay, I wanted appreciation, assistance, and to not be fucked over. I appreciated the free duolingo though. Paying me would’ve made it a job and it’d be a job well below my actual job pay rate.
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
No one needs to pay them. Not being treated like garbage is sufficient.
If the company is treating you as an employee, they are required to pay you. There is precedent for this.
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.
AOL had volunteer assistants. Ultima Online had volunteer assistants. The courts ruled that those were employee positions based on the way those positions were managed.
Don't even get me started on unpaid internships.
Fair enough, I wasn't aware of there being any precedent there. However, at least from those two cases, it seems that they were both settled out of court, so there hasn't actually been a legally binding ruling on this kind of issue.
To be clear, I'm not saying that unpaid internships etc. are good; only that I'm not sure a court would find them to be literally illegal (regardless of whether or not I think they should be).
Unpaid internships are legal so long as the business receives no value from the intern, and the courts would uphold that, if ever a case came before them about it.
In practice, the only people who have the option of taking an unpaid internship - where they have to spend many hours a week in a workplace that doesn't pay them, to the exclusion of spending those hours in a workplace that does pay them - are already finanically stable enough to do so, probably because of generational wealth. AOL and UO were exceptions, probably because people wanted to participate in those communities in their spare time, as a kind of hobby.
Those people are being inducted into the system that propagates that generational wealth. It's not in their best interest to protest not being paid when they should be, because the repercussions of doing so would be being excluded from that system. So it's highly unlikely that any real "this should be a paid internship" case would ever be filed. The amount of hours which would be ordered to be compensated, even if it was treble damages, wouldn't be worth the cost of going to court, let alone being excluded from whatever industry.
You think those "open or else" threats are taking Reddit closer to that conclusion?
IANAL (oh yes, I do): As soon as Reddit The Company started exerting unilateral control over subreddits and their moderators for business purposes, and not legal or liability purposes, they most definitely were treating mods as employees.
I think they are getting closer to else
Or, I know this is crazy, don't piss them off when you already make their money?