cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/8427191
Depending on volunteers is not sustainable, given the regulatory scrutiny that the company will now face, said Julian Klymochko, CEO of alternative investment solutions firm Accelerate Financial Technologies.
"It's like relying on unpaid labor when the company has nearly a billion dollars in revenue," he added. Reddit reported revenue of $804 million in 2023, according to an earlier filing.
I don't see them shifting to paid mods or offering adequate compensation for the current ones. It's a 24/7 customer service job for countless little cliques with their own subcultures/agendas/ideological leanings.
If you flatten that to generic spam removers, automoderator already does that and the website is horrible despite it. If you have official power mods, the guy tasked with censoring all leftist dissent in r/worldnews is also tasked with knowing what modern art is in r/modernart and the ages of anime characters so nobody posts CSAM in those subreddits. If I'm running a subreddit for free and someone else is getting paid to, I'm no longer bothering to. If I'm about to create a subreddit and know reddit will steal it and give it to the censorship squad once it's large enough, I'm making that on Lemmy instead.
They built their entire company on the backs of volunteer exploitation and there is no unfucking that without revealing how fragile reddit is.