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I’d be interested to see where if at all the economic incentives in these systems reflect previous political systems (like feudalism) - my guess is that this is

I’d be interested to see where if at all the economic incentives in these systems reflect previous political systems (like feudalism) - my guess is that this is where the metaphors break down. For example there was a tangible consumable result of sharecropping - food that you eat. Youtube is the same sharecropping system, you get a small percentage of the product you produce (advertising revenue) for the organization (YouTube) who provide the property that you use. For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform. So this can’t be compared as it’s a different economic system. I’ve heard it argued that some moderators are getting paid or whatever but I’ve seen no evidence of this and as a moderator and founder of 100,000 person Sub, that is very popular fora small community, at no point have we been approached as the moderator team by Reddit or otherwise, to be compensated for our work. Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer on top of a strict corporate hierarchy. I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?) I appreciate the differentiation here - even if there’s limited expected application for the layperson using the phrase colloquially in an Internet forum.

xwdv 3y ago
As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Is there a market for converting karma or gold into fiat without breaking terms of service?
- OnlyLys 3y ago
  I don't know about karma or gold, but I earned a few death threats as a subreddit moderator. Now that was truly rewarding.
  - a2tech 3y ago
    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.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      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.
- oblio 3y ago
  How?
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  You can’t pay rent with karma or Reddit gold.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    Wait, you mean these internet points are fake??
- sampo 3y ago
  > 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.)
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago
  No.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Nope - none of the above. Besides why would I want “karma” or “Reddit gold?” Worthless pseudo-internet currency
  - xwdv 3y ago
    They said the same thing about bitcoin.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Also correct!
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  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.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    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.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  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. I think it was Ellen Pao during her time of "making reddit profitable". But I don't think reddit will ever be profitable. The value extraction on users and the big money interests are so counter to niche communities that made reddit what it was, that reddit will just kill itself over it. I'm sure it will still exist in some form. But not as we know it (or have any kind of use for). Similar to how predecessor https://digg.com https://digg.com still exists but is just around to serve no one.
kvdveer 3y ago
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.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  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.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    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.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  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
Aleklart 3y ago
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.
- deeviant 3y ago
  Your post really comes off as if you are sore about being banned from some sub.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    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?
    - deeviant 3y ago
      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.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        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.
        deeviant 3y ago
whateveracct 3y ago
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.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  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
  - whateveracct 3y ago
    You've ignored the brand and product part. Which is as big if not bigger than tech when it comes to Reddit's success.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      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
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  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.
koolba 3y ago
> 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.
- indymike 3y ago
  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.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    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
  - paulmd 3y ago
    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.
pessimizer 3y ago
> 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.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  > 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.
rvba 3y ago
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.
Spooky23 3y ago
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.
dsir 3y ago
> 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 https://sociables.com/community/Sociables/home
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> 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.

xwdv 3y ago

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

birdyrooster 3y ago
Is there a market for converting karma or gold into fiat without breaking terms of service?
OnlyLys 3y ago
I don't know about karma or gold, but I earned a few death threats as a subreddit moderator. Now that was truly rewarding.
- a2tech 3y ago
  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.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    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.
oblio 3y ago
How?
madeofpalk 3y ago
You can’t pay rent with karma or Reddit gold.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  Wait, you mean these internet points are fake??
sampo 3y ago
> 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.)
PhasmaFelis 3y ago
No.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Nope - none of the above. Besides why would I want “karma” or “Reddit gold?” Worthless pseudo-internet currency
- xwdv 3y ago
  They said the same thing about bitcoin.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Also correct!
Apocryphon 3y ago
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.
- paulmd 3y ago
  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.
wkat4242 3y ago
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. I think it was Ellen Pao during her time of "making reddit profitable". But I don't think reddit will ever be profitable. The value extraction on users and the big money interests are so counter to niche communities that made reddit what it was, that reddit will just kill itself over it. I'm sure it will still exist in some form. But not as we know it (or have any kind of use for). Similar to how predecessor https://digg.com https://digg.com still exists but is just around to serve no one.

kvdveer 3y ago

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.

joeythedolphin 3y ago
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.
- michaelt 3y ago
  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.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
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

Aleklart 3y ago

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.

deeviant 3y ago
Your post really comes off as if you are sore about being banned from some sub.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  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?
  - deeviant 3y ago
    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.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      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.
      - deeviant 3y ago

whateveracct 3y ago

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.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
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
- whateveracct 3y ago
  You've ignored the brand and product part. Which is as big if not bigger than tech when it comes to Reddit's success.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    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
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
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.

koolba 3y ago

> 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.

indymike 3y ago
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.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  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
- paulmd 3y ago
  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.

pessimizer 3y ago

> 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.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
> 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.

rvba 3y ago

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.

Spooky23 3y ago

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.

dsir 3y ago

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

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> 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.