This is a very interesting article about the long-term sustainability of the Fediverse for moderators, administrators, and developers. We’ve already had two of our lovely Beehaw admins take breaks to take care of themselves as they experience the burnout associated with maintaining a community, and I think for a lot of use we already know how exhausting it can be to take a center stage position in an online community.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any great starting points for what to do, but at least talking about it is a start.
I still think it changes the calculus for how it feels moderating an online space when you’re volunteering vs when you’re getting paid for it. The latter can let you emotionally datach yourself from it. The former? It’s an act of love for which you receive hate
Very few moderators on reddit are getting paid anything to moderate subreddits, the key difference is that lemmy is still in the early stages of moderation tools.
If those “moderation tools” means something like the automated blanket moderation with no recourse that’s going on Reddit… we already have that, it’s Reddit and pretty much every other for-profit platform where “some false positives” are acceptable as long as they don’t damage the income sources by offsetting the influx of new users.
At least a few third-party apps are being adapted to Lemmy, those were where most of the richest moderation tools were. Reddit has a pretty substantial, matured API to handle a lot of those moderation tasks. That’s where Lemmy needs to catch up more than anything else when talking about moderation. I think that moderation in Lemmy will be important, there’s a lot more at stake for these communities if proper moderation is not in place.
reddit? YouTube?
This is a good observation
I disagree. When you are paid for it you become reliant on it to make ends meet in your life, so you’re more willing to put up with absolute garbage that you shouldn’t have to. This forces people to try to detach from it as a coping mechanism while they fall further down the hole. Paying them won’t change a thing about the mental health issues and will probably make it worse.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay them, but we shouldn’t look at it as the fix for this either.