Comment by Karrot_Kream
5 days ago
Think about a Reddit mod's incentives.
They:
- Don't get paid
- Spend time having to do some really thankless work
- Don't really have a regular work schedule
So what kind of person is going to do it?
Someone who is willing to do the work for no pay. For smaller subreddits and areas where the work of moderation isn't that heavy, you'll find passionate individuals.
Mods that moderate more time consuming content or the power mods modding many subs are chasing some other incentive. For some that means explicitly monetizing their time by pushing products and companies who pay them. For others it's the ideological satisfaction of pushing viewpoints they want pushed and suppressing viewpoints they want suppressed. For some it's prestige. For most it's probably some mix of all three.
What's absent is any incentive to surface organic, human content. That's merely a side effect of what mods do, not their main job.
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
> Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
The problem is most users are the "casuals", by a wide margin, in general; and a lot of them are also "weirdos" in different ways. Some of them will be obsessed with a different site; others have serious issues in spite of all the forms of social proof you describe.
I think it's a bit tougher than that. On top of what zahlman said, a lot of "casuals" don't really bring much value to a social media site. If you comment once a year you're not really offering much to the conversation. That's what makes this problem so tricky. The most motivated users are usually motivated by something more than intrinsic motivation. The least motivated users just aren't very good users of the platform. A better incentive structure would help incentivize the "moderately motivated" user.
But what if they do get paid, by a competitor? It's very easy to DM a mod and tell them they will get x amount if they skewer the odds in your favor or blast your biggest competitor.
What makes you think this doesn't happen? I can almost guarantee it does. If I were willing to pay a Reddit mod off and I saw unfavorable coverage for my brand I'd absolutely try to win the mod over by paying them more than the competitor is paying.
What's kind of crazy about this is in many lines of business you must disclose payment for advertisement. Be interesting to make this a civil law case and sue moderators for lack of disclosure.