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People 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.

by hoopd 11y ago

pvg 11y ago
What 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 ago
  exactly.
- hoopd 11y ago
  That'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 ago
    I 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.
    - hoopd 11y ago
      The value debate is old and captured in the Diamond-Water Paradox. The TL;DR is that market value and inherent value are different. As you said, mods are being paid in intangibles. If you log in to a website several days a week to fulfill the responsibilites that come with your position, in exchange for compensation, for years at a time, that's called a job. you may not be an employee but at some point you are working. I'm not saying we can assign a dollar value to this work, I'm saying we can ballpark an amount of value and we might as well communicate that in dollars. If you'd like we can measure it in millions of hours donated. The magnitude of these numbers alone should make this interesting. Because reddit has no close competitors there is no market for mods, reddit has a monopoly. Since there is no market to tell us what the value of moddding is we have to guess. If there were a hundred reddits competing with each other for mods we could trust the level of compensation they receive. Glut of supply and only one buyer means compensation will be far under what it would be in a "fair market".
      - mreiland 11y ago

People 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.

by hoopd 11y ago

People 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 ago

What 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 ago
exactly.
hoopd 11y ago
That'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 ago
  I 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.
  - hoopd 11y ago
    The value debate is old and captured in the Diamond-Water Paradox. The TL;DR is that market value and inherent value are different. As you said, mods are being paid in intangibles. If you log in to a website several days a week to fulfill the responsibilites that come with your position, in exchange for compensation, for years at a time, that's called a job. you may not be an employee but at some point you are working. I'm not saying we can assign a dollar value to this work, I'm saying we can ballpark an amount of value and we might as well communicate that in dollars. If you'd like we can measure it in millions of hours donated. The magnitude of these numbers alone should make this interesting. Because reddit has no close competitors there is no market for mods, reddit has a monopoly. Since there is no market to tell us what the value of moddding is we have to guess. If there were a hundred reddits competing with each other for mods we could trust the level of compensation they receive. Glut of supply and only one buyer means compensation will be far under what it would be in a "fair market".
    - mreiland 11y ago