Re:Online altruists making Reddit more accessible
by fiblye on Sunday March 01, 2020 @01:13AM
(#22455421)
The internet has had paid and free communities and forums forever. I can’t think of a single one where voluntary non-employee moderators got paid. Tech support forums for ten billion dollar companies also sometimes have non-employee moderators who I’m pretty sure are not paid.
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Re:Online altruists making Reddit more accessible
by notadev on Sunday March 01, 2020 @11:44AM
(#22457641)
AOL used Community Leaders to moderate chats and forums. The CLs filed a complaint with the Department of Labor for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and eventually sued, winning a $15 million settlement.
It's a violation of the FLSA to use volunteers to do unpaid work at a for-profit company, even if the volunteers are OK with not getting paid. It's only going to take one mod to file a DoL complaint before Reddit scraps all the mods or centralizes the mod duties under actual employees.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program