Not sure if this is the answer, but if instead of looking at money economics, we look at entertainment economics. Instead of producing crops, people produce entertainment. Instead of being paid with money, they are paid with status/validation/power.

I am insufficiently familiar with the feudalism metaphor to claim it doesn't break down, but on a cursory glance, it seems to hold up.

Entertainment is one piece, but the control of information and narrative is far more critical. Think election victory or losses, capital city riots, business boycots, and opinions towards LGBTQ+ etc. I've always believed flesh and blood died in wars but the war was really over thinking. In today's insular, isolated, community-deprived world, your social media (for many people at least) is their only way to interact with or understand the world at all.

Are these moderators powerful, shady media moguls like Rupert Murdoch?

Or are they naive chumps with too much time on their hands, tricked into doing free labour for a big corporation that actively disdains them?

I always thought the people manipulating opinion on social media were using bot accounts, rather than moderator positions.

It seems like because there isn’t a direct economic exchange, we still want to squeeze that transactional milieu into the equation to answer “why would somebody do something if they aren’t paid.”

So the only possible result, because the assumption is that nobody does anything is that isn’t selfishly compensated, is that there MUST be a psychic - non-priced - selfish benefit to the user. That might be true but I’m not sure that you can use those interchangeably because the latter has no pricing mechanism.

Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.

No, I actually think that there’s another organizational structure here that we’ve just not seen or have a name for. Namely it’s where volunteers provide labor for privately owned property, have some control over said property but receive zero of the excess economic value produced by the mix of property holder and labor.

Procedurally: 1. Reddit the organization fronts some amount of capital to provide the platform

2. Volunteers then stake claim to manage and curate limited sub-properties (sub reddits)

3. Reddit the organization sells advertisement placement within the volunteer properties - completely separate from and without the collaboration with subreddit moderators

4. Reddit then keeps 100% of the advertising dollars and zero go to the moderators (or for that matter active members who arguably make the bulk of valuable contributions via content that drive revenue)

Contributions to “open source” that are not on publicly distributable licenses would fall into this category also.

Note here, I’m not using this particular point to complain about the structure - even though I believe it’s not a good structure. I’m simply pointing out that this is a structure that exists for which we don’t really have a coherent understanding of in my opinion

One thing I'm kind of curious about is:

> Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.

If Reddit came to you and tried to charge you to keep the subreddit running at all – as in, it'd be deleted from the web if the mods didn't pay – would that change the answer here? I have this suspicion that – for at least some smaller subs – it would.

And for bigger ones, I would guess mods might not... perhaps because they guess Reddit is already making enough ad money off their work for that exchange to seem unfair.

> If Reddit came to you and tried to charge you to keep the subreddit running at all – as in, it'd be deleted from the web if the mods didn't pay – would that change the answer here? I have this suspicion that – for at least some smaller subs – it would.

Only speaking for myself and not the rest of the mod team but I would still say no

moderators got what are they wanting the most - power over their little garden where they can do whatever the f they want with people. they mad now realising their power was not absolute and they can be kicked out of community the same way they regularly kick their peasants.

Your post really comes off as if you are sore about being banned from some sub.

A person never getting banned from a subreddit isn't some badge of honor. All it shows is they're a good sycophant who never says anything that would make the lords mad. How can such a person know he has a backbone at all, if he bends to all power?

I'm always so curious what subreddits all the people on here who seem to feel like they're engaged in some war against the man are getting banned from. I was mostly using reddit for talking about like... coffee and cocktails and architecture and a couple video games. There weren't pages of deleted comments or ongoing flamewars, it was mostly people just chatting about their common hobbies.

I'm not unaware that there are other subreddits with more controversial stuff, but this sort of comment just feels like people claiming that everyone else is a sheep if they haven't been kicked out of a grocery store or a public park. I'm really curious what percentage of reddit's MAUs are folks who are experiencing which sort of subreddits mostly.

The reason behind their ban tends to be banal, as it typically aligns with what you would expect: Vaccine denialism, and so on, almost always intruding into an unrelated discussion.

The effectiveness of proper moderation is what largely keeps it from catching your attention.

The implication that anybody who's been banned from a subreddit is probably an antivaxxer or some other form of cretin, cute. In reality, reddit has automod bots mass banning countless thousands of accounts without consideration for their position, simply because of where they said a thing and not the thing that was said. And you can even catch bans for criticizing this because the mods employ the same pattern you have; anybody criticizing their capricious moderation must surely be a terrible cretin!

Would you like to give an actual example of a subreddit you're banned from because you were posting in some other subreddit? Or evidence that that's happening to the average reddit user?

I certainly believe it happens, but the times I've heard it come up was generally because of brigading and harassment from one subreddit towards another, which certainly sweeps up some folks who just happened to be posting on both, but feels reasonable enough, situation depending.

Ah I see rarely is it the case that they uttered regrettable or abhorrent remarks; the outcome always stems from either a conspiracy or an authoritarian moderator reveling in their power.

Are the automod bots a conspiracy? Conspiracy.. that's a new word that means any crazy obviously false theory right? If I insinuate that somebody is a conspiracy theorist, that proves they are wrong of course.

You should definitely continue yelling into the void about this.

Reverse psychology, that's a neat trick.

It seems like you just confirmed my original comment. Thanks.

If you think the average person that gets banned in a sub is some sort of freedom fighting martyr, then you frankly don't really know much about the subject.

I am not Aleklart, so I cannot logically confirm anything about Aleklart's history on reddit.

> If you think the average person that gets banned in a sub is some sort of freedom fighting martyr,

I'm saying that average people get banned from subreddits all the time for completely innocuous remarks. Never getting banned isn't a badge of honor, all it shows is that you're skillful at never stepping on the toes of mods despite the capricious nature of reddit's moderation. That's nothing to be proud of.

Legitimately curious - do you have any evidence that the average reddit account is banned from multiple subreddits all the time?

I've had multiple accounts I've been using for years with hundreds of posts/comments and as far as I know I've never been banned anywhere, and it's not like I haven't gotten into arguments or put forward opinions. I've had posts deleted, but always because I hadn't formatted it properly or followed some rule, but even that didn't lead to a ban.

> I'm saying that average people get banned from subreddits all the time for completely innocuous remarks.

I'm am saying my past 14 years on reddit do not confirm your statement.

Sure if you go to r/conservative and say something blue, you get insta-banned, because they do indeed hate free speech there, but this type of situation is the vast majority of "innocuous remarks getting somebody banned" : not understanding the subreddit.

> Never getting banned isn't a badge of honor

I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up, because nobody said it was, a straw man.

If you go to a red subreddit and say something blue, it isn't surprising that you'll be banned from the red subreddit. But you're also likely to be banned from the blue subreddits as well, and even gray subreddits that have no overt political affiliation, simply because you associated with the red. Despite not being a radical, you can catch bans simply for arguing with radicals. This is what I mean when I say that regular people frequently catch capricious bans on reddit.

> I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up, because nobody said it was

I bring this up because I am responding to your attempt to shame Aleklart, with the implication that he did something worthy of getting himself banned:

> Your post really comes off as if you are sore about being banned from some sub.

Suppose he did get banned, does that imply he did something to deserve getting banned? No. Because reddit bans are frequently capricious. And if he was banned for no good reason, is it shameful that he was banned? No. And if you never get banned for capricious reasons, is that meritorious? Also, no. Quite the contrary in fact.

I just don’t buy this argument, it’s built on pure anecdote.

Can you provide a falsifiable hypothesis and data that would point to support?

So the hypothesis would be something like: For the population of Reddit moderators, over 50% percent are primarily incentivized by dictatorial ego actions rather than community support actions as measured by evaluating the following moderation actions (ban, delete etc), over the time period 2007-2023.

Can you provide that?

they also get a sweet green username

Your "compensation" is you get to use Reddit. They wrote the software, run the servers, manage the user accounts, by nature of their product and brand bring people to the site and then your sub (and potentially others).

Let's not act like Reddit itself hasn't been extremely valuable to these communities. It's just untrue that the mods do the only important work to build subreddits.

A lot of subs I'm in have low touch mods and I'm fairly sure if they didn't do it someone else easily would have. Hasn't dropped them from thinking they had fiat power and rights to shut down the subreddit despite many active users wishing to continue using Reddit.

you're describing an internet forum, technologically unimpressive as of decades ago

it turns out, the communities and their members (mod and non-mod) are more valuable to reddit than vice versa

You've ignored the brand and product part. Which is as big if not bigger than tech when it comes to Reddit's success.

you've ignored that the brand and the product are the communities, including mod- and non-mod users

without reddit, the communities could exist on any other forum software, hosting paid by anyone else, and be the same

without the communities, reddit is worthless

Great!

So what do you call that economic system in which individual people volunteer to improve privately owned property and the only “compensation” is simply the opportunity to use/improve private property.

And again, unlike sharecropping, volunteers get zero of the property as fiat to convert.

Preemptively there’s no possible pathway to claim that Reddit is a “Public Commons”, because nobody but the legal owners and their designated controllers, determine the distribution of value or future of the property.

I think you're really misapplying labor politics to a casual website. I'd even go as far to say that comparing being a reddit mod to share cropping to be tasteless and offensive! I wouldn't say that opinion in public with my face & name associated with it, that's for sure.

Mods can Just Quit. They can go self-host. Nobody is making them use Reddit. This isn't a labor situation where anyone's livelihood is at stake.

Covered your complaint here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36562292

I will never stop giggling at this. What reddit actually, actually provides is not technically impressive for anyone that's done relatively anything at scale. In fact, it's impressive how utterly shit the site operates most of the time, given the only, the ONLY THING THEY DO is develop and run it.

And yet, I still basically can't watch ANY DAMN VIDEO on the site now that I can't use 3P clients, yes, years after it's introduction the video player is still worse than stepping in dog shit.

It's a database, some over engineered piles of JS to load a list of links, and by reddits own messaging, a crap API. It's really not special. The mods and users made it what it is, in spite of what it is.

Okay go stand up another Reddit then that anyone can create a subreddit on. It'll probably be better, right? Reddit isn't stopping anyone. People have migrated off sites before (digg). Go on then, angry Redditors! It's not a strike if you're too feckless to walk away.

Lol, many of us have, but thanks for breaking out one of the three tropey abuse-excusing talking points that get rehashed here every other day.

> Reddit then that anyone can create a subreddit on. It'll probably be better, right?

I've never had a topic like reddit get people so eager to shove words in my mouth. REDDIT GOT LUCKY and maybe were calculating it how they used free labor. They didn't make anything, they have no unique value prop after losing power users and moderators.

And despite what some funny people here say, the frontpage is a laughingstock still. When I peek once a week, because yes, I actually have some self-wilp and self-determination and feel no need to prop up shitty little platforms run by shitty lying little dictators. I know, shocking that some of us have values, and we even live them.

Instead of creating more strawmans to put in my mouth, why not actually rise to the discussion and tell me what reddit has that no one else can touch. I think you've conceded it's not tech.

Right it's not tech - it's their product that people enjoy using that is what drew a lot of people to Reddit. Especially in its growth years. Subreddits as a concept are a really great product idea and one thing that struck me as innovative and cool when I joined. And the subreddit product feature is why I've gotten to be in multiple niche interest-based forums hosted on Reddit that probably wouldn't have existed otherwise.

To act like Reddit-the-product is valueless and did nothing right to get to where it is today is just silly.

As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?

> As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?

You earn karma by posting popular content. You can do that whether you are a mod or not.

(Well, in some cases a jealous mod might remove your posts, and then re-post them as their own. So if you are willing to abuse your mod position, then you can earn karma by leeching off your users.)

I don't know about karma or gold, but I earned a few death threats as a subreddit moderator. Now that was truly rewarding.

Crazy. I post under my real name on reddit and I'm a moderator for our local community. I've never gotten any sort of real threat, but its concerning that it ever happens since I'm so easily found in reality.

It's one of the dangers of moderating on the Internet. Back when I was doing it, I had to deal with everything from death threats to foreign police (suicidal users) to white supremacists to the FBI (bomb threats) on a fairly regular basis. It's proportional to the size of the community and how strong the social expectations are, but the interconnected nature of the Internet means that you'll get drive-by attacks just by being accessible. I know more than one mod that had to resign their duties/accounts because someone started stalking them across other platforms and in real life.

You can’t pay rent with karma or Reddit gold.

Wait, you mean these internet points are fake??

Is there a market for converting karma or gold into fiat without breaking terms of service?

How?

No.

Nope - none of the above.

Besides why would I want “karma” or “Reddit gold?” Worthless pseudo-internet currency

They said the same thing about bitcoin.

Also correct!

It’s funny how the responses are so critical of the idea, which reveals that Reddit hasn’t really done all that much with karma- in the sense that the idea of using reputation systems as actual currency, or social credit and the like, was regularly theorized as a future post-scarcity sort of thing in sci-fi stories, yet the company never went far enough with it to experiment in that decision. So Reddit karma is less valuable than MMO in-game currency.

that's probably a good thing, because karma isn't really a representation of actual quality so much as it's mass-market appeal and bandwagoning.

you can crank out great posts in a 100k-1m user discussion sub all day and you'll never make anywhere near as much karma as popping into PCMR and doing "NVIDIA bad" "4060 too expensive" one-liner shitposts. 100x the karma for 0.1x the effort.

Gold hasn't existed for years when they cancelled it and made reddit premium which also happened to be 3x as expensive and offered less.

That was also when I stopped my subscription and the start of the downfall of reddit IMO. This started way before spez was CEO.

> For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform.

The one angle I can see is selling access and priority on the sub externally. It’s clearly against the terms of service, but if done within the parameters of the sub it blends in fairly easily.

A good analogy is the private tax collectors in old Europe. The right to collect taxes would be sold to a private individual. In this case, the mods would be paying with their time to manage the rest of the sub and Reddit would turn a blind eye to paid mod abuse.

The feudalism model stands up, where Reddit is the kingdom, reddit executives and employees are nobles and the king’s men. That means the mods and users are viewed as part of the land, just as serfs. Any mod who date challenge the crown will be discredited, accused and stripped of what little they have.

Just as in feudalism, you see the crown trying to govern by dividing the people and making them focus on survival so that the crown’s taxes flow and they dare not challenge local landowner.

This seems to nail it pretty well

I think the reason people balk at this is because in the case of physical property, you’re talking about literally life and death. It’s hard to make similar comparisons with text on computer screens.

So irrespective of whether or not structurally it makes sense, people I think are fighting with the comparison because the stakes are so different

Mods are pretty clearly the nobles who landhold and collect taxes/etc. Not really a member of the court or the royal institution, but entitled (literally - Baron, Duke, etc are literal titles) and commissioned by the royal institution to rule over a small fief in the day-to-day matters.

The king wants the kingdom to run smoothly, and the baron makes that happen. If they do a shitty job they can be removed. On the other hand most barons won't want to let things get to that point, because it's still way better than being an actual serf (assuming they're not punished/executed).

And yes, many mods do derive personal satisfaction and power and influence (banning people they find particularly disagreeable, or particularly skilled at calling out a particular bit of bullshit the mod wants to push) in their work.

I've experienced the "you're banned on a random comment for no explanation, and if you modmail and ask why you're modmuted for a month instantly with no reply" personally as well, in a large discussion sub, over something completely innocuous. Hi bizude.

> For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation

You can control political conversation, you can control criticism of products and companies, you can pump up stocks, you can encourage the spread of useful rumors within industries, etc...

There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward.

edit: this is aside from the people just trying to feel powerful, who will obviously be everywhere. It's hard, unpaid work. People doing it will tend to either be very strange or being paid from some other source. No different than Wikipedia, honestly.

> There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward.

This is a strawman.

Of course there are people paid to influence every single public opinion website from Twitter to Hacker News. That is a completely separate question as to what the economic incentives of moderators are.

The only way that makes sense is if you are making the claim that the plurality of moderators, or at least some exceptionally high percentage, are paid or otherwise compensated by somebody else to manipulate their subreddits.

There is no data to indicate that this is a widespread coordinated or otherwise repeatable business practice such that we could say that it is an economic system, comparable to other economic systems.

Moderators can "earn" money in many illicit ways.

For generic subreddits, they can censor submissions & posts about certain products, while looking the other way at brigaded posts related to some other product. I dont even mention the most blantant things like stickying some topic.

This was made to eleven on all those crypto subreddits where there was tons of drama for mods pushing a certain crypto, or point of view, while ignoring other (e.g. drama between /r/bitcoin and /r/btc).

In gaming subreddits mods often get the chance to fly to some event hosted by the company that makes the game, or get in game things. So they arent "paid", but they certainly "listen" to the company (if they dont listen, they wont get a plane ticket and a hotel room + other "benefits).

Not to mention power mods, that are hungry for power and trade spots to moderater. There was that person who "moderated" 300 subreddits by trading spots and they could ban you from those 300 subreddits. Imagine that person got bribed to ban you? The new rage is trading spots by sock-puppet accounts, so it is not so visible.

The worst is, that we could easilly make a "better reddit" with multiple solutions: public and semi public subreddits, where users can vote on rules and vote on mods, public mod queue, super-mods reviewing it, users reviewing it and finally admins reviewing it. To have multiple methods to constantly chase for cliques (wikipedia in theory has it, but it's a complete parody - if 2 admins defend each other an user cannot do anything + admins selectively enforce rules: they use them on you, but not their own -> again this could be solved with anonymization of posts for review). Also to make it work it would have to have reviws by admins to ban brigaders (old style attacks with sock puppets blocking or allowing everything - like upvotes/downvotes worth 0).

I dont understand why apart from HN, there isnt any rich person who makes a board the way 'it should be'. Users would pay money for decent discussion.

Feudalism had a mutual benefit. And feudalism isn’t sharecropping. Residents of the manor had some protection from the lord and the kingdom as compared to people outside of that system. Would I want to live as a peasant? No… but that was the human condition for a long time. And a small freeholder wasn’t necessarily better off than a serf at various points in history. Sharecroppers are just tenants, who often get trapped using the “company store” (ie captive suppliers etc) and make little or nothing.

YouTube is not the same as Reddit. A YouTube creator benefits from the platform and is paid for performance. It more like a record label type model. Reddit is different - as you said, moderators get no economic benefit. They just are the petty kings of a message board, and do a bunch of work for the company for free.

Reddit’s problem is there has never been a moat or a business. Their api made it easy for google to index them and gave them outsized influence. But they got too much investment and always had an ineffective team incapable of developing a coherent strategy to deliver the returns required to the investors. Examples are everywhere… old.reddit.com should not exist. If IPO was the path, it shouldn’t be a huge porn platform.

> Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer

Perhaps this is a fundamental flaw with the platform. I see no reason why the people hosting and curating the communities shouldn't have a share of the money generated from them.

I've been working on a platform called Sociables to help address this problem. On the platform, people who create and run the communties have optional means of renumeration baked into the platform such as offering monthly membership plans, selling "awards" that can be assigned to comments and posts, donations, and more.

While it's not a fit for every type of community, I think aligning the incentives of the platform provider with the sources of where the the value is created (the communities) is crucial for fostering a healthy environment and avoiding this situation where the platform goes to war against itself.

https://sociables.com/community/Sociables/home

> I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?)

"Useful idiots"?

You're doing useful work, creating a community, for free. But if you analyze that in political or economic terms, you're doing work for free that enhances the wealth and/or power of someone else. So if politics or economics is your framework, then the phrase I quoted might fit.