Pay Structure for Moderators
Posted by QuibbyOne@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 81 comments
I have been working on a Reddit alternative for a little more than a year now. It is currently in Beta and will be launching in the next month or two. It is called Quibby.
One of the things I hate about Reddit is the fact that moderators are not compensated for their work. Speaking from experience, sub moderation could easily qualify as a full time job.
Every major social media platform allows content creators to earn an income based on their content. Tik-tok, Youtube, Instagram, Etc.... Reddit does not.
However, I am having a hard time figuring out how to structure moderator compensation and would love some input from this community.
Potential Factors for Payouts
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Number of Community Members
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Number of Monthly Active Users
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Number of Posts
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Ad Revenue Split
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Post Engagement
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Post Frequency
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Post Popularity
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Total Time Spent on Sub or Posts
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Payment for Each Post (From Mod)
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Payment for Each Post (From Community)
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Salary
I could create an algorithm that takes all of these things into account, but then the compensation would not be super transparent so that nobody could manipulate it in order to earn a higher income. My initial thought was to pay $5 per post created by a moderator, and $1 per post paid to the moderator for user generated content, and an ad revenue split.
Lets say you were a moderator of the "Taylor Swift" sub and I wanted to target that sub to start building on Quibby. What would be an enticing offer for compensation that would make sense to you?
Major-Boot8601@reddit
A lot of words, OP. But I just searched the store and your Quibby app is not there
Aluris@reddit
Did you ever finalize this? I wasn’t able to find your website yet but I am thinking along similar lines on moderator pay structure.
westwoo@reddit
You won't be able to pay people enough to incentivize them working with the same quality as they would've done for free. Let's be real - many if not most mods are neurodivergent and are hyperfocused on something pointless that is extremely important to them. Paying tiny sums won't make those people nearly as hyperfocused, in fact it will corrupt and disable their hyperfocus since neurodivergent people typically are also very sensitive to the feeling of unfairness
There has to be a graph of some kind of motivations of random people, and it plummets the moment money are introduced and slowly climbs until the salary is very respectable
Entarly@reddit
This is actually very interesting. Do you have any sources for this?
westwoo@reddit
Of course, give me a second, I'll whip up a free well researched detailed report on how to organize the best social media service in the world
Entarly@reddit
That would be great.
What about that money thing you talked about?
biricat@reddit
Volunteer mods are almost always stupid and abuse power. Even if they have good intentions in the beginning, it always leads to personal bias and abuse of power. Because in the end it's not a professional role or work. It would be best to either create your own mod team or hire an external moderation agency. Either pay them hourly or monthly. Set very strict guidelines about what should be removed and what shouldn't be. Keeping it vague and leaving it to the individuals again always leads to personal bias.
Why do you want to share revenue with mods? This seems unsustainable in the long run. Revenue splits always suck and the company has to keep decreasing the rates to keep the growth. Whether people like it or not, a lot of mods are required to run a site. If you are sharing revenue with mods, your company will not be sustainable.
Also although mods are important, it not really a high skill job to be paying revenue share for.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
"Why do you want to share revenue with mods? This seems unsustainable in the long run."
Plenty of platforms do it. Youtube is a good example. I dont see any reason to believe that sharing revenue would be unsustainable.
holoxianrogue@reddit
YouTube advertises around the content and a majority of its moderation is automated. Reddit does not have the revenue model at scale to pay its moderators and if they did someone would have figured it out already. Get back in the lab.
biricat@reddit
Youtubers and streamers make their own content. They also grow, work on their skills and may or may not make better content. There is an element to skill which needs to be improved. What are mods going to improve at? What will be the difference between a mod with a 1 year experience and 10 year experience? Is their a massive difference in skill or they gaining some valuable experience for modding for 10 years that a mod with 1 year experience can't do. Will mods become exceptional at looking at posts and deciding what to remove and what not to remove. Comparing mods to youtubers makes no sense.
I saw another comment of yours where you ask what will make a mod what to mod your platform. You seem to treat mods like some youtuber or a streamer which needs to be given exceptional benefits to bring to your platform. Like pay millions to a twitch streamer so they would stream exclusively on your platform. Put a job listing for mods anywhere and you will get 1000s of applicants.
NoSignificance3817@reddit
This.
Reddit mods are paid exactly what they are worth. If you could filter out trash-tier mods with a reporting system and harsh oversight....maybe.
An r/mildlyinfuriating mods banned me because we were talking about crimes being committed and THEY read "criminal" as "black" when it was in no way used as a dog whistle.
If ignorant crap like that can happen with zero recourse...they are worth $0.
textuist@reddit
hmmm I wonder if instead mods could try to monetize something else they have like content, with the volunteer moderator position being like free advertising for them
reddit_judy@reddit
Because (IMO) the mentality of most humanity seems to thrive on chaos, there's one type of forum that has never ever seen the light of day, and that's one which discourages mob-rule. Such a forum (which i have a pictorial demo of) would:
Reddit encourages mob rule via karma. YahooAnswers also encouraged mob rule via the class (caste?) system. So i got bad karma because the campinggear sub is populated by hardboiled types whose answers were clear as mud, and then they zapped me at their whim simply because of my legitimate requests to clarify their answers.
P.S. You know how squatters have been getting to own real-owner's property, due to some perverted laws? That's basically the chaos which has been happening for decades on forums, due to the way they've been programmed. I.E. chaotic-or-useless trolls (squatters) would run rampant on Original-Posters' (true-owners) turf. And nowadays, you can add nonsense-bots to the trolls. So you have maybe 99% or more who are trolls or clear-as-mud or bots. And maybe 1% who are useful.
scottyWallacekeeps@reddit
Quibby you say?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Indeed
Gr0mpyGoat@reddit
*squints* Is that you, Squablr dev?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Not only am I not that, I have no idea what that is
bonkykongcountry@reddit
Sounds like the type of platform that will crash and burn in 3 weeks because mods will make bots to spam posts so they can get paid lol.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I just listed all of the possible metrics that COULD be considered. The point of this post is to get opinions on what people believe would be the most functional, taking into account your point of being able to just spam post with bots (which I agree with).
Lets say Reddit want to start compensation their Moderators. How do you think they would do it?
bonkykongcountry@reddit
They would most likely do it based on ads displayed, awards gifted, etc in that subreddit.
People pay for ads and awards, so they would probably share a piece of price of those.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yes, that is one of my items in the list. However, in the beginning there really wont be any ad revenue or gifts/rewards. I don't like selling people on the "future potential" instead of what we could pay them now.
NetSage@reddit
I mean if there isn't much ad revenue or sales what are you going to pay them with?
Maybe allow donation to a specific sub and the mods get a cut of it that's distributed evenly amoung them?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
A salary, potentially
KobeGriffin@reddit
Salaries rely on revenue. If you don't have ad revenue, what's the model for generating revenue? I would tie the payment of mods as closely as possible to whatever that is.
NetSage@reddit
Again I just get how you would afford it. Even with mods working for free reddit is burning cash.
Wanderlustfull@reddit
reddit has spent quite some time looking into moderator compensation methods, via charity contributions (I believe).
boemmel@reddit
You might want to think about that name again, as there was a failed social media video platform with a nearly identical name (Quibi) just a couple of years ago.
Besides possible copyright issues, I would not want my new platform to be even remotely associated with that dumpster fire if I were you…
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yeah I realized that after the fact.
I am not all that concerned with it. Actually, I have another company that has been around for 20 years. A company with the same name (slight variation) came around and grew to be MUCH larger than mine. Then it crashed and burned. I get a lot of calls from pissed off customers looking for that company that no longer exists and even got some bad google reviews from it.
There are only so many words that sound reasonably good and can be pronounced well that have domains you can actually register. The market for registering and sitting on domains is garbage. I did the best I could and actually like the name.
Appreciate your input!
boemmel@reddit
Hey if you like the name, know and thought about the issue and are not concerned, more power to you!
Just wanted to mention it especially because the defunct Quibi was created by media executives and was a media company and I think the old assets are now also owned by media companies as well.
And those guys are notorious for both being willing to sit on old licenses and copyrights forever sometimes just out of spite and also for being extremely litigious and seemingly having entire armies of lawyers just standing by to sue the shit out of people for seemingly nothing.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yep, completely understand and like I said, I very much appreciate this input.
Unfortunately, I am not a stranger to litigation.
Shugazi@reddit
Your Delta example does not help your case. They are in completely different industries and share an existing word as part of their full names. Do you really think someone could start manufacturing “Pontiak” cars or a store called “Toys Are Us” or “Bloqbuster Video” with no issues?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Short form video platforms and forum based community platforms are clearly different things
KobeGriffin@reddit
They're Internet social media to the wrong boomer judge and we all know it. Still, I think you're fine.
OhZvir@reddit
I think posting along is not enough. Need to add other activities, such as edits, user bans, communications, etc. Make a table that lists all possible functionalities available to moderators, and come up with a rate for each. This way it would be more balanced, encourage them to use the features given to them, and lessen the “overplaying” platform abuse.
chesterriley@reddit
Paying people to ban users. What could go wrong with that site? /s
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Absolutely, all of these functions will be available to moderators.
Emergency_Plankton46@reddit
I would look at how existing sites like YouTube handle it. You can benefit from them having already encountered and addressed the pitfalls of people gaming the system and issues like compensating people (or not) for controversial content.
How will you address sub squatters? One of the worst things about Reddit imo is that mods can abuse their undeserved control over subs with names like ‘news’ or ‘Star wars’ and I assume this issue would be much worse with financial incentives involved.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Sub squatters are a big problem. Each community will have a mechanism to remove moderators by popular vote. I cant think of a better way to do it other than it being democratic.
cliopedant@reddit
There is an entire profession of community mangagment, which is what you're talking about here. Your idea to pay a salary is a good one - make it worth the while of someone who knows how to do build community, give them the tools and enough to live on, and maybe a bonus if they manage to grow the community faster than expected.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yeah I like this idea. Not sure how to find those people unless I just recruit mods from subs here
Shugazi@reddit
Your Delta example does not help your case. They are in completely different industries and share an existing word as part of their full names. Do you really think someone could start manufacturing “Pontiak” cars or a store called “Toys Are Us” or “Bloqbuster Video” with no issues?
Ajreil@reddit
I would try to judge the health of the communities they moderate rather than the number of actions needed to keep them healthy.
Ask random long time subscribers if they have any issues with the mod team.
What percentage of content is missed by the mods and needs to be removed by the admins?
What percentage of removals or bans get overturned by the admins?
CptHammer_@reddit
I feel like an ad revenue split would be a metric that theoretically should reward mods of popular communities with greater compensation than niche communities. This greater reward should entice more moderators resulting in greater moderation of a sub.
However, in a community with greater numbers of mods the total split should get divided.
I think your compensation for active posts and comments is nice but prone to abuse. Perhaps active posts or comments that meet a minimum metric of engagement. You wouldn't want to have to pay out on a community of 1000 members where the only activity is the mods posting for themselves.
A tier plan?
Communities of over 100 are a minimum. Then it's like a penny a comment and a nickel a post and only if it gets 10 (10%) engagement (likes or dislikes or comments).
Communities over 1000 double the pay, but need only 9% engagement. ($0.02 & $0.10)
Communities gaining another 1000 double again for each 1000.
At 5k reducing engagement requirements to 8% stop doubling compensation. ($0.10 & $1.00)
At 10k reduce requirements and increase compensation again. You decide what might be fair.
nachohk@reddit
As someone who moderated some larger subs for a while:
Fundamentally, what you want is moderators who are incentivized and rewarded for maintaining a community that users want to continually participate in.
Moderator action metrics are not a proxy, otherwise what you are really incentivizing is abuse of your platform to game the metrics and get payouts.
Community user count or other similar engagement metrics are not a proxy, otherwise what you are really incentivizing is meme and clickbait and outrage and porn subs that may drive active user metrics in the short term, but are bad for making users actually invested in your platform. Memes and bait and porn are everywhere, and users will have no reason not to migrate and find that content somewhere else. The reason why something like reddit has such staying power is the subs where users share useful knowledge and resources, and build actual communities.
My suggestion is to try linking compensation to retention of active users, by proportion, over some moderate threshold. (Maybe 100 subscribers/whatever, as your platform is starting to find an audience. Maybe 20,000, if you ever reach the scale of reddit.) So, for instance, scaling with the proportion of MAU that were also MAU in the previous month. Have some kind of curated communities program where the moderators of high value subs, as determined by the platform owner, are paid a higher rate.
more_beans_mrtaggart@reddit
Getting a bit ahead of yourself I think.
What’s the site’s stance on free speech, lgbqt, penalisations, timeouts/banning etc?
I’m going to want a “meet the admins” as this seems to be where most fall down.
What’s the funding source, short and long term?
Is/will the site be open source?
then we can talk money.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
This post was not really meant to try to sell anybody on using Quibby. It is specifically about uncompensated moderation that exists on Reddit and how that one issue can be improved upon. Even if I were to say that the site is literally a carbon copy of Reddit (which it is not) a compensation structure for the workforce still adds significant value.
However, I am going to try to answer anyway.
1) Our stance on free speech is two fold. If you open a community, you can call it whatever you want, say whatever you want, and ban whoever you want. You could say that banning people with opinions that differ from yours is against free speech, I would say that the person banned is welcome to open their own community and say whatever they want in opposition. This is no different than the real world. You are allowed to say whatever you want in any public forum, but not in a private place.
There are exceptions to this. If you open a community that is specifically geared towards the love of gaming, and a non-gamer trolls non stop, you should be able to ban them. Free speech or not.
If you open a more generic community like r/politics and people are banned just because they are a democrat or republican, it would become apparent in a moderation audit.
2) The admin or moderator can be judged by a community of their peers. We will have a moderation log that allows you to see what actions a moderator has taken. It is not possible for every user to be happy with every moderation action, however if enough users band together we have mechanisms to have moderators removed/replaced.
It needs to be treated like a democracy. If you choose to only allow certain moderators for your personal feeds in a community, what about the spam that specific moderator removed? Perhaps you don't want any moderation at all and your feed would be filled with infinite spam. There is no perfect solution that I know of.
If you are against specific moderation of a community, you can unfollow it and create one that better suits your ideals. If you don't like a specific Youtube channel, you can unfollow it as well. Why should this be different? How could you even have it function differently? If you have a REAL alternate solution, I would love to hear it.
3) The founder is the funding source both short and long term.
4) It is not open source
Quibby isnt meant to be a perfect solution to every problem that exists on Reddit. Democracy itself has significant problems, but I still believe it is one of, if not the best form of government.
Quibby is meant to solve problems that I believe can be solved and one of those problems that I am passionate about is moderator compensation.
EveningHelicopter113@reddit
So you have nothing against hate speech then
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I dont believe in speech censorship but there are limits.
Calls to incite violence is an example of something that would not be tolerated.
EveningHelicopter113@reddit
Why do you believe racists/homophobes/transsphobes/nazis/etc deserve a platform to voice their bigotry?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Can you explain how you arrived at the conclusion that I believe any of that?
Racism, homophobia, nazis, etc.... are all deplorable. We are clearly talking about different things.
Moderators should not ban speech based on their feelings. That does not translate to "We believe racists deserve a platform". Do you attack anybody that says they believe in free speech with this nonsense?
EveningHelicopter113@reddit
you didn't mention a single one of them, all of which fall under hate speech.
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
RedditAlternatives-ModTeam@reddit
Comments must be civil. What does this mean? No racism, homophobia, blasphemy, arguments, drama, trolls, insults, slurs, automated rage bots, political attacks, profile fishing, etc.
Use your best judgement. If something feels rude, it probably is rude.
Eternal_inflation9@reddit
Man you are annoying
BaByBaBo0N@reddit
Back in the day (circa 90s-00s) you didn't hire moderators on message boards. Moderators were usually passionate members of the topic of that message board and happily donated their time because they were going to be on that board discussing the topic regardless if they were a mod or not.
Find people passionate about the subject matter, people that are leaders in the community, people that love the subject, people that post daily/hourly/etc. and then promote them to a mod position.
That's why i always shake my head when i see mods here on reddit complaining that its an unpaid job. Its not supposed to be paid, you get the privilege of being a leader of a community/topic that you love.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Somebody is getting paid. 100s of millions of dollars on the backs of other peoples passions
BaByBaBo0N@reddit
I spend MANY hours to this day on message boards related to hobbies i love (including topics i love on reddit). I don't get paid a single cent contributing hundreds to thousands of hours over years publishing unique creative high quality content. I do it because i love the topic, i love the hobby, i love the discussion, etc. If it was something where money was involved I probably wouldn't be contributing as much as I do. Not everything needs to be about making sure im being broken off bread. Not everything needs to be commoditized.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
So if you were paid for your passion you wouldn’t do it anymore. Got it
Every now and then when I think a statement couldn’t possible be disagreed with, I get surprised
BaByBaBo0N@reddit
Yes scrooge mcduck people love the hobbies and topics they love. They dont contribute or moderate for money they do it for the passion of the topic itself. Find those people, and promote them to moderators.
Your focus shouldn't be about making sure mods get paid ... just build an awesome platform without spam and empower contributors to contribute.
RamonaLittle@reddit
Here's a crazy idea: pay minimum wage (or higher). You know, like companies are legally required to do, especially for something that "could easily qualify as a full time job." If you doubt you'll be able to do that, then maybe the site isn't a good idea, at least if the intent is to run it as a for-profit business.
That said, it sounds like you're conflating two different things. Content creation is a different role from content moderation. At least on reddit, most posts aren't created by mods. In your list of "Potential Factors for Payouts," I don't see any mod actions listed at all, unless you're trying to use things like "Monthly Active Users" as a proxy for number of mod actions. But why do that when you could just look at the total number of mod actions? If you did want to pay mods per action (instead of per hour), you could come up with a schedule with appropriate payments for (say) removing a post, replying to a user question, reporting CSAM or a threat to law enforcement, etc. But (as u/bonkykongcountry suggested) this creates an incentive for mods to create more work for themselves, which would be bad for the platform and company profits. So actually an hourly wage would make more sense.
Content creation could have a different payment structure.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I assume you read my post where I indicate "Salary" as an option. Your tone suggests otherwise.
Moderation here is kind of a blend of content creation and forum moderation. Creating a sub around a niche topic and then moderating that sub to abide by guidelines kind of fits both definitions. You are creating something, through others.
With that said, I dont have a problem paying a salary, but that would be easier to do if I was telling people what to create instead of letting them create and enjoy the fruits of those creations in a comp model that is more appropriate.
RamonaLittle@reddit
Hmmm, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. I know someone can be both a content creator and a content moderator, but I can't envision a site where all moderators are both. They're just different roles that require different skills. And if there are non-mod creators, wouldn't the mod-creators favor their own content and try to hide the rest?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I am mostly referring to the mod that created the community. They envision what they want the community to be about and moderate in order to reach that goal. In my opinion, that process is similar to content creation. They are creating a niche community.
The community's creator wouldn't have a reason to favor their own content. Their income wouldnt change. If you want to create a thriving community, encouraging others that also find value in the community's posts, is mutually beneficial.
Certainly not all mods would be that. As with Reddit, the lead mod would hire other moderators and can pay them a cut of their revenue for whatever workload they take on.
RamonaLittle@reddit
Now this is getting complicated. The lead mod needs to know the real name and SSN of lower-level mods, and send them a 1099 if necessary? Does the lead mod also decide on the payout structure for them? That sounds like running a small business, which most people don't really want to do or aren't cut out for.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Hire was probably not the correct word to use here.
Right now you can assign moderator roles on Reddit to other users to help with the work load. On Quibby, you will be able to do this and also assign a revenue split to that moderator (if you choose). We would handle the payouts.
RamonaLittle@reddit
Ah, that makes more sense. Well, if you try it, I hope you'll report back with how it's going.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I just want people to be paid for their work. Especially when a company is earning off of it.
It is the best system I can think of. That part of it I have figured out already, its what metrics to compensate based on which is the hard part.
StatementIcy2159@reddit
Remind me why we care about mods?
RamonaLittle@reddit
Tell me you've never seen an unmoderated site without telling me you've never seen an unmoderated site.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yeah, I am not sure how anybody can have the stance that mods are not important. Surely they have an email address that gets spammed.....
RamonaLittle@reddit
I see it pretty often on this sub and r/FreeSpeech: people say "I want a site where nothing is ever removed ever!" Like . . . if someone posts your dox or your nudes, you want that to stay up? Do you want to see CSAM? Do you want the site to get so glutted with spam that it's unusable? A lot of people really have no idea what goes into just keeping a site online and usable.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
You can please some of the people, some of the time
\~Steve Jobs
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kdjfsk@reddit
imo, what would make the most sense is an ad revenue split.
some subs will generate more or less revenue. (users watch more or less ads, or ads are more valuable/for more high end products). for example, ads in /r/gaminglaptops (ads for laptops and other electronics) are probably more valuable than ads in /r/origami (ads for...paper?)
but similar to youtube, etc, let mods grow their community and supplement income in other ways. promos, giveaways, merch, sponsors, etc.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I know for sure that Ad revenue will be split.
That is what prompted me to make this site in the first place. The idea that passionate communities built around subjects like the one you mentioned generate a lot of money for reddit, and the workforce (moderators) are paid nothing.
Mainly I posted this because in the beginning there would not be any ad revenue, but I want people to see the long term value of paid moderation. I was thinking maybe $5 per post with daily caps to start (say 5-10 paid posts daily) and then raise those caps after we see they are value posts. Thoughts on beginning comp?
kdjfsk@reddit
people will just make minimum effort shitposts to get the $25 or $50 every day. you dont want to reward that.
youtube didnt start with ad revenue either.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yes, well ill have to manually monitor them.
Youtube was one of the first of its kind so its hard to compare
kdjfsk@reddit
the quality would improve only enough to meet whatever your bare minimum is. honestly, people would probably just copy/paste reddit posts, or have AI write posts.
they would do no work to help grow the site. you want their rewards to be dependant on creating actual value and gaining real followers.
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
I agree. Not sure how to get a foothold though. Guess ill keep working on it
tunachilimac@reddit
So I make AskQuibby on your site and it blows up like askreddit you’d pay me a few thousand dollars a day?
QuibbyOne@reddit (OP)
Yes.
I don't know the economics of the sub, but based on the number of followers I have to assume that ad revenue generated off of traffic to that sub is substantial. Couple that with the other metrics we will use (not sure yet which is the point of this post) thousands of dollars a day is pretty much guaranteed for a sub that size.