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Please don't call my ideas "horseshit" and then tell me I'm the one doing myself a disservice. You seem to think you have a pretty strong grip on things so you
by hoopd 11y ago
Please don't call my ideas "horseshit" and then tell me I'm the one doing myself a disservice.
You seem to think you have a pretty strong grip on things so you tell me: ballpark, how many hours of work do you estimate have been donated to reddit by its moderators and what's the dollar value of that work?
- pvg 11y agoThe dollar value of that work is zero. The moderators are willing to do it for free and there's a line of people who would do it for free. Consider this - what do people who feel their work is undervalued do? They negotiate for higher pay, they look for a better job, they leave. In this particular tantrum, how many moderators of popular subredits can you point to that resigned in protest? I'm guessing that number is also zero.
- hoopd 11y agoPeople only leave when there are places for them to go. There's no reason to get sidetracked with a debate about how value is defined, it's a simple question.
- pvg 11y agoWhat do you mean sidetracked? You brought up dollar value and I think there is an obvious answer to that part. The market dollar value of that work is nil. Additionally, these people don't want to go. They like whatever intangible benefits moderating brings them. If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
- mreiland 11y agoexactly.
- hoopd 11y agoThat's why I didn't say "market dollar value" or "market value". The challenge is to ballpark a lower bound for the value that reddit has received from the mods over the years. If you're dying of thirst and somebody offers you a glass of water some will argue the market value of that glass of water was zero. I get that. There's also the value of what that glass of water was worth to you and there are many ways to approximate that value. There's what you were willing and able to pay at the time, there's whatever water prices were at the time if you walked into a store, the size of a loan you would have taken out for it, etc. If for whatever reason this person gave you many life-saving glasses of water over the years, and you showed little appreciation, there may come a point where the two of you will debate the difference betwee market value and utility value. I'm not trying to debate market vs utility value. I'm just saying if the mods have donated $100 of time over the years it's different from if they've donated $100 million of time over the years. It's an attempt to have a rational discussion about whether or not they're "throwing a temper tantrum." You're getting sidetracked because I'm using dollars to measure utility value instead of market value. If you'd like you can think of it this way: what would the cost of reddit's mods be if this was happening in a "perfect" market where other companies were competing for moderators. > If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has. This should be covered in the first semester of college economics: if a company has no close competitors you can not assert that its employees must be happy because they haven't left. People have been screaming for months for a similar place to leave to, it doesn't exist yet.
- pvg 11y agoI think your entire set of assumptions about people 'donating' time, that there is an assignable dollar value, making analogies to employees, etc is deeply flawed. This is a very straightforward exchange - moderators spend time moderating in return for the endorphins and jollies this activity brings them. By 'leave' I mean 'stop moderating'. At any time, any moderator can stop moderating at the loss of nothing more than the endorphins and the gain of extra free time to devote to some other hobby. There is a glut of people who would take up their spot. For nothing. That's where the heavy competition is - lots and lots of people enjoy doing this sort of thing, for whatever reasons. It's not like there is a shortage of internet message boards and in most of them, calls for volunteer mod positions are flooded with applicants. Reddit is not benefiting from the inexplicable altruism of some sort of rare and highly valuable specialists. And for all their talk, the mods know this too because they did not even threaten with a walk-out, let alone attempt one. Their only leverage was to force their users into this spat with the admins.
- mreiland 11y agothe idea you're espousing is horseshit, and I'll repeat that as many times as I like. As for your question, I reject it on the grounds that the assumption is faulty and therefore not worth discussing.