L.A. MillerJun 20, 2023
eyajpng

Ironically, the thing that made me realize just how much free labor I was providing for Reddit as a moderator wasn’t when a fellow mod quit the site because of how much free labor they were providing.

It was when Reddit offered a bunch of mods an absolutely pathetic “moderator appreciation gift” a year or two back.

Before that, I was still perfectly happy telling myself it wasn’t labor, but just a way of giving back to the hobbyist communities I was part of.

Jun 20, 2023 at 3:34pmWeb
Show threadeyajpngJun 20, 2023
But yeah, not too long ago the Reddit admins sent the mods of a bunch of larger subreddits a DM that they were receiving some kind of appreciation package. It was honestly pretty laughable, mostly amounted to a bunch of free trials for subscription services. I forget most of the options, the two best were 6 months of Duolingo Plus and—the only physical item—one free trial snack box from a snack box subscription service.
Show threadeyajpngJun 20, 2023
And I did laugh about it. But at some point in the hours following, it suddenly crystallized in my brain: Reddit cannot function without willing mod teams, and this terrible gift/promotional collaboration shows that they both 1) know it, and 2) choose to treat their volunteer workforce like shit anyway.
Show threadeyajpngJun 20, 2023

It’s the pizza party effect.

Throwing a pizza party will, for at least a portion of any given workforce, have the opposite of the intended motivational effect.

Or put another way, it has the intended effect of demonstrating how much you value your workers, but the unintended consequence of highlighting the disparity between that and how your workers see their own value.

Show threadeyajpngJun 20, 2023

I do want to say… I can empathize with the mods who are re-opening their subreddits in defeat. I don’t really, uh, respect those decisions, but I can empathize. Same goes for people staying on Twitter, now that I think of it.

The hooks they put into your brain are no joke. I can’t say with any certainty that I would have been able to quit Reddit if all this had gone down like 5-10 years ago. Quitting now was the result of *years* of misery. That dopamine reward cycle can really lie to a person.

Show threadNickyJun 20, 2023

@jepyang A very similar situation happened on the site Habitica in December. The unpaid moderators stepped down as a result of something else, and then realised how much unpaid work we were giving a company that was profiting off it. We did so out of love and without regret at the time, but looking back -- wow.

It can be really sad when it's a community you love and when you've invested yourself into it; are you doing OK?

Show threadeyajpngJun 20, 2023

@shanaqui Thanks, I’m doing alright with it. I had already been mostly off of Reddit for a few months now, for a lot of reasons that go beyond unpaid labor. So I’m actually grateful in a way because the current drama gave me a push to make a clean break.

But yeah, it’s wild how well these companies are able to abstract away the free labor that goes into them. :/

Show threadNickyJun 20, 2023
@jepyang It was amazing how much my time and energy came back to me once I stepped back; I feel a lot better overall for it! I hope the clean break works well for you.