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Yeah, and home cooks do billions of dollars worth of free cooking per year for their friends and family. The fact that something can be valued in dollars doesn't actually mean that it's wrong that it's being done for no monetary compensation. You can put a dollar value on anything, including every constructive hobby, sport, and pastime that people do.
Home cooking doesn't have a single business entity that aggregates this value though. Reddit would be worth much less without this free labor, as well as most other social media companies would without user generated comment.
What it means though is that the people doing the work are often doing it due to power tripping, political axe grinding or outright being paid by other organizations to astroturf their viewpoints.

Nothing is actually "free" and reddit isn't getting free moderation, there's a cost to that which shows up in the quality of the moderation.

It is sort of similar to the aphorism that if the product is "free" that you are really the product. The moderation (at least on large subreddits) comes at a cost, it just isn't a direct financial cost that reddit pays.

It's worse than that. They just added up the number of hours mods spend on Reddit and multiplied it by $20/hr.

That isn't "worth" - that's a "cost" estimate.

This comparison is moot. Home cooking isn't voluntary work in any sense, nor is it in any public interest. Its ensuring your _family_ has dinner. The alternatives (such as takeaway) are each more expensive.

The problem with your take is that free, public labor devalues paid, public work. This is also why its difficult to compete with 'free' services such as 'free email'.

Except those who benefit from home cooking are your family and friends, not the investor class/ad traders. Cant see how this relates at all..
I find the premise of this... bizarre, I guess?

Reddit is a site that lets you create your own community about whatever (within some pretty permissive ToS grounds) you want and run it however you want. Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community? I don't see how it's any more relevant than the labor of all the people posting and voting on content.

To be fair it does seem like the group behind this study is also interested in the latter too. I'm just not sure I agree with the premise any more than I would agree with the premise that people calling each other on the phone are providing free labor to the phone company since you normally have to pay professionals (eg radio hosts) to produce audio content.

Maybe for the long-tail, but the largest subreddits are far from pet projects. I am under the impression that being a mod on a sub with millions of subscribers is at least a part time job and it's hard to imagine what Reddit would be like without the largest, most popular subreddits. In those cases, I think the premise of the study seems fair.
If you create a community that generates ad/gold/whatever revenue for Reddit mods should be able to get at least a bit of it. No communities = no revenue for Reddit.
>Why would you get paid for running your own little pet project community?

Reddit is a for profit company that makes money off the work of these people. If it wasn't for mods, the site couldn't really exist as it is. Doesn't it seem a bit weird to you? Because it seems to me as though the "value" that this company creates is very much dependent on the free work of the mods (and the posters, for that matter). In the same vein, the reason why Wikimedia is a non-profit, it's because it would be wrong for a company to profit from the work of the unpaid editors that created all the articles and did all the research. Why should reddit be any different?

"run it however you want"

This isn't true. You either get in line or your community is banned.

I think the premise of this is off. Instagram doesn't pay people either. The fascinating and difficult part of reddit's business is that almost the entire value of the platform is controlled by moderators. So if you want to influence reddit users you're better of doing deals with the mods than with reddit itself. Of course, because reddit doesn't have any real relationship with the moderators it's very easy for these mods to go off and do deals with advertisers directly with no oversight. We can probably argue about how often that happens, but there can't really be any doubt that it does happen. It's only when it boils over into public beef that we ever get a real glimpse of it[1]. But you don't have to be a genius to understand that some sub-reddits are just absolutely ripe for advertising - how much do you think it's worth for Uniqlo to be at the top of a fashion guide on /r/malefashionadvice? I'd bet you it's good money.

[1]:https://www.insider.com/wallstreetbets-reddit-bans-moderator...

Are the researchers really sure that the moderators on popular subreddits are really 'unpaid'? Recall the whole editor-for-hire scandals that plagued Wikipedia? A PR firm interested in controlling the direction of discussion on Reddit or Wikipedia has a large vested interest in having their paid staff members act as moderators for popular subreddits in order to control the direction of discussion and spike stories that don't fit their desired narrative, whether that be on behalf of a government or a corporation or an individual. This is hardly a new problem, see this story from 2012:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/wikipedia-ho...

> "Perhaps the paid-PR scandal is a coming of age for Wikipedia in the era of SEO shills, and the public's increasing awareness about powerful corners of the Internet -- and how subject they can be to the interests of close-knit friends and business associates. In this light, a Web site as insanely valuable as Wikipedia will always attract gaming for promotion."

This is hardly just the moderators on Reddit, there's also the armies of upvote and downvote bots that can be deployed to push a story to the top or bury it, ditto with comments, and then there's things like the outright bans for anyone raising particularly controversial topics (bans for mentioning the Wuhan lab leak on Reddit is one of the more blatant ones, for example).

All in all, social media is not what anyone in their right mind would call a 'reliable unbiased information source'.

I'd wager this is an extremely low estimate about the value of that labor. From the paper it seems like they compared with freelance moderators on upwork.

I'm a part of a couple of super niche subreddits where there are moderators with deep expertise in the area. I know that IRL some of these mods are often billing $100s/hour for their work but on reddit they do it free, and they freely dispense the same advice.

This line of reasoning is founded on a false premise: namely that the moderators who are not financially compensated get nothing out of performing the duties associated with their role. On the contrary, the endless supply of willing volunteers for the task suggests that they do get something significant out of it. I would suggest, to start: ego validation, feelings of personal power, and most importantly the ability to skew discussions in order to support one's desired viewpoint. I would suggest, additionally, that the last listed reason is a significant source of potential bias in moderation, in view of the fact that the value proposition of being a moderator is very appealing to an unrepresentative subset of users of a service. Furthermore the financial value of being able to do this is far greater than a typical paid content moderator wage.
You can think of it as free work, of you can think of it as people building something they care about. When I post on here I don't think of it as free work but more as contributing to a community I want to be part of.
This is nothing new, although the scale of it definitely is.

The idea behind the superfan doing all your work has been studied and worked with for some time.

People on the internet will do an amazing amount of work for recognition or just meaningless internet points.

A great write-up on the matter: https://www.amazon.ca/Science-Social-Beyond-Likes-Followers-...

You used to be able to get this free from the Lithium website, but that might be gone now.

Reddit is toxic and the mods are power tripping. That is why they moderate. People who otherwise would have no social status in life where others will listen so they end up on reddit where others have to listen. Of course it is not every singe one of them but a lot of mods are just pathetic. Don’t agree with the narrative - banned. And this will be the downfall of reddit. Inconsistency across the site and unjust bans for merely disagreeing with a mods narrative. I would love to see reddit fail.
It's not just Reddit. All the major "social media" platforms, from YouTube to Facebook thrive off of unpaid work by content creators.

Amazon and IMBD thrive off of user reviews, which provide one of the main sources of value for users of their sites.

That's not to mention all the unpaid work by programmers who write all the open-source/Free software that are the foundation of many/most billion-dollar companies world-wide.

AOL’s settlement with volunteers drew out super clear conditions for community moderators to exist without ever getting paid and it’s the playbook all social media sites with community moderation follow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

People willing to do this for free remind me just a bit too much of all those angry Christian moms in the 80s-90s policing music and video games for “society’s own good.”
A lot of them are not impartial moderators. They are more concerned with maintaining their echo chambers. So I highly doubt the labour is worth that much.
I was once a moderator at /r/ApplyingToCollege and other college related subreddits. When I started, there were about 20,000 subscribers, and when I left it was in the hundreds of thousands; now it's one of the largest college admissions forums in the world. It was worth it for me to help underprivileged students get high quality information about college and financial aid options, and then see those same students get into excellent colleges. It was quite a lot of work and most moderators on that subreddit did not last more than a year.
Yet if they were paid they’d probably be found wanting from a professional viewpoint.
The number cannot possibly be this low
Much of this labor is activism, which is why they do it.

They get to control the narrative, to suppress dissent/wrongthink, and to bury inconvenient news.

Unpaid labor is worth what you're paid for it if other people will do it for free. Reddit no more owes a debt to these moderators than you owe the guy who cleans your windshield without permission.
$3.4M/year sounds like a very small amount for Reddit. It's probably worth to pay out the money just to get rid of the bad news like this one.
I wonder if a DAO would be possible, that distributes the ad revenue of a Reddit like system to the moderators of the forums.

Writing the code seems to be not too hard.

Advertisers could send funds to a smart contract which in return gives them a token which enables them to display ads for a certain amount of time.

Each piece of ad revenue could be distributed to the moderators of the forum that generated it.

Would there be any major hurdles for such a DAO to get traction?

community-owned forums are a social good, it's silly to describe this as a job that reddit should do on their behalf

this is like saying that stopping yourself from eating a donut is worth money to the state because the state pays for healthcare, and would otherwise have to put a cop in your kitchen, and cops make $x/hour, etc

'unpaid cyclists perform labor worth $100mm / year to citibike'

And probably more when you consider the legal shield they provide.
Wikipedia is arguably the most valuable website in existence.
I was thinking the other day about all the posting people do on Twitter for free. It's insane how much work people will put in for such little reward or effort except for internet clout.
So what you're saying is

>he does it for free

I've never quite understood why anyone would want to mod the front page subreddits, r/pics, r/funny, r/askreddit etc. It must be a lot of work and your reward for your efforts you get a non-stop stream of abuse from posters who are either pissed off because you're too lazy and let crap content through or pissed off because you're power-hungry and are only letting through posts that support your own personal agenda.
The platform problem is that people fails to understand that a platform is someone else services.

With Usenet we are all equal, our "free work" is for ourselves in our community, with platforms it's for the owner.

It's NOT different from some people who fails to understand the difference between a local thing and a remote service, just shifted to less IT illiterate people, unfortunately with the very same mechanism...

Porn is built in. Getting rid of it would Tumblrcide. Let's see how that IPO goes.

As a rule, all moderators suck. This has been true since before http.

Moderation is cheap. The price the consumer pays for it is having content be removed/filtered/edited because it violates a submission guideline, ToS, or a moderator's worldview. Usually the latter. I don't think you can quantify that value personally. Definitely worth more than a few million dollars for the potential reach.
Every subreddit is also now beginning to just get political, making their job worse.

Majority of frontpage reddits are political subreddits:

/r/whitepeopletwitter

/r/blackpeopletwitter

/r/antiwork

/r/economy (yeah even this now)

/r/workreform

Thankfully the more I browse reddit the more I develop a de-sensitized self to extreme left/right wing. Now I just auto-filter it on my brain. That's a good thing.

I see this very quickly made it's way to the front page, are the HN mods trying to tell us something? /s
I expect Reddit or some competitor to eventually create a platform where ad revenue is shared with subreddit/content creators (a bit like YouTube does). It would make a lot of sense.
This is such a one-sided view. The moderators get value, probably in excess of what $3.4MM (if a price could even be put on it), by having a properly running subreddit.
Truth to be told, some mods don't do a stellar job.
They should at least be getting the money from the Gold/Silver/etc awards...
So all of reddit can be moderated by 68 people getting paid $50k/yr?
They are all communist so it works out just fine.
They really do it for free.
Worth to whom?