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>Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community? Reddit is a for profit company that makes money off the work of these people. If it

>Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community? Reddit is a for profit company that makes money off the work of these people. If it wasn't for mods, the site couldn't really exist as it is. Doesn't it seem a bit weird to you? Because it seems to me as though the "value" that this company creates is very much dependent on the free work of the mods (and the posters, for that matter). In the same vein, the reason why Wikimedia is a non-profit, it's because it would be wrong for a company to profit from the work of the unpaid editors that created all the articles and did all the research. Why should reddit be any different?

Dylan16807 4y ago
They'd still be making a lot of money if they were non-profit. And wikipedia doesn't let you make whatever article space you want. If wikimedia started hosting user-controlled wikis I wouldn't say they have the same obligations to those subsites.
smabie 4y ago
It would be weird to pay people for things that they are willing to do for free?
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  Heavens, no, I'm not arguing that. Trying to monetize our free time is what got us into this entire mess in the first place. Just that the dynamic is questionable, since it feels to me as though the company is abusing that willingness in order to make a profit.
cecilpl2 4y ago
I once worked on a video game that was translated into many different languages for free by passionate community members. Since the game was frequently updated, eventually it made sense to give these "community translators" early access to new text. Also it made sense for them to provide their translations in a form our pipeline could consume. Voila, they have unpaid jobs. I skipped a bunch of steps there, but basically through no malicious intent on anyone's part, people's passion was leveraged into making them work jobs with expectations and deliverables. Of course they were free to not do the work, but they'd be letting their community down if they didn't. At that point we had an internal discussion about the ethics of the system, and wound up deciding we should pay them.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  That's a very cool story, thank you for sharing it.

Dylan16807 4y ago

They'd still be making a lot of money if they were non-profit. And wikipedia doesn't let you make whatever article space you want. If wikimedia started hosting user-controlled wikis I wouldn't say they have the same obligations to those subsites.

smabie 4y ago

It would be weird to pay people for things that they are willing to do for free?

TremendousJudge 4y ago
Heavens, no, I'm not arguing that. Trying to monetize our free time is what got us into this entire mess in the first place. Just that the dynamic is questionable, since it feels to me as though the company is abusing that willingness in order to make a profit.

cecilpl2 4y ago

I once worked on a video game that was translated into many different languages for free by passionate community members. Since the game was frequently updated, eventually it made sense to give these "community translators" early access to new text. Also it made sense for them to provide their translations in a form our pipeline could consume. Voila, they have unpaid jobs. I skipped a bunch of steps there, but basically through no malicious intent on anyone's part, people's passion was leveraged into making them work jobs with expectations and deliverables. Of course they were free to not do the work, but they'd be letting their community down if they didn't. At that point we had an internal discussion about the ethics of the system, and wound up deciding we should pay them.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
That's a very cool story, thank you for sharing it.