That’s a laughably low amount. If it were that cheap, reddit would throw out all unpaid mods and do it themselves. That’s less than 1% of their revenue, and they would have total control over their site, that would be a bargain. That would be 200 minimum wage workers full time. I’m pretty sure 200 fulltime workers is waaaaaaaayyyyyy too few to moderate ALL of reddit… (and this is just looking at time investment, never mind experts in their field moderating subreddits about very specific topics.)
Reddit boasts about 400.000.000 users, so with 200 mods, that would be… 1 (minimum wage) mod per 2 million users… Yeahhh… that’s gonna work XD
I’ve seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it’s accurate, Reddit should just… do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They’d be stupid not to.
And honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.
You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it’s your productivity that will suffer, no one else’s. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you’re not being huge hypocrites and pretending it’s community-run.
The problem is that Reddit can’t actually do that. Because the cost (as others have pointed out) would be way higher even at minimum wage. Reddit is completely reliant on free labour. It would have gone under a long time ago without it. Given the leadership’s hostility towards the people that create the content and help maintain that content, Reddit going under is overdue and the platform is now past it’s use by.
Some on Reddit are celebrating this because “mods bad”
Meanwhile, I’m a Redditor for 10 years and haven’t been banned once, nor have any bad interactions with mods. The first thing I follow rules and second I barely interacted with mods in the first place because I’m not an asshole. I don’t QQ because they removed my low effort meme or hate speech or whatever.
Simple as.
It’s also interesting the sentiment on non-Reddit platforms are more pro-user than pro-spez.
