4 ms·

Hosting Reddit is not free, maintaining reddit is not free, moderators time is not free

• npteljes 5y ago
  Moderators' time is free, and maintaining reddit could be free. Hosting uses electricity, hardware and internet connection, and neither of those are given away currently.
  • motoxpro 5y ago
    Ah, agree to disagree on that one. That view seems exploitive to me. Moderation, OSS maintainers, etc are all doing those jobs for free and providing them to us for free but there is a large opportunity cost. That's where the saying "it's not worth my time" comes from. If I asked you why you don't maintain and moderate reddit for free (I'm sure they would be happy to have you there and pay you nothing) I would assume your answer would be I have better things to do with my time or I don't have enough time. i.e. I need to be paid for that to be worth it.
    • npteljes 5y ago
      Well, yeah, ideally I'd like an UBI-like system, so that one can moderate Reddit full time, and still pay rent and groceries. But letting that aside, do you think that all volunteers are in fact exploited? Or just these examples, because effectively they help someone else make money for free?
      • motoxpro 5y ago
        I mentioned exploitive in response to "Moderators' time is free". Which I feel like is an exploitive view. I don't think being a volunteer means you are exploited, but I think someone not valuing their time is almost the definition of it to me. I think moderators time is extremely expensive. They could be doing one million other things with that time and getting paid for it. They could actually be doing the EXACT SAME thing and getting paid for it if they worked for a Reddit/Facebook/StackOverflow or were a community manager for a brand.