Most social media platforms heavily rely on the work of an army of volunteers to keep communities ticking over. Research from Northwestern highlights the sheer scale of this effort, suggesting that Reddit alone benefits to the tune of over $3 million per year. The researchers believe that providing a dollar value to this volunteer can help users fight back against some of the harmful policies introduced by platforms in recent years, especially around content moderation.

“Big tech companies have introduced some harmful practices, facilitating the spread of misinformation and failing to adequately support volunteers battling the proliferation of harmful content online,” the researchers say. “Broadly, our research is about thinking through how we can redistribute the decision-making power in the tech industry to include users. This is one step toward that.”

Community moderation

Reddit, like many other online communities, relies on human volunteers to ensure that communities thrive. Each subreddit is overseen by a team of volunteers who have a real passion for the topic and the community.

The researchers question whether these volunteers are inherently giving companies like Reddit a free ride by devoting their time and energy to the project. This is especially as few moderators really know how much their work is worth to the companies they support. The researchers pondered whether knowing this information might influence how moderators behave and interact with the company?

“Putting a price tag on the labor that people — in this case, content moderators on Reddit — have subsidized is leverage those moderators could wield when asking platforms for better resources and tools to help them monitor more effectively,” they explain.

Data labor subsidy

The researchers coined the phrase “data labor subsidy” to encapsulate the reframing of the issue and to try and place a financial value on the contributions volunteers make to tech platforms. The researchers calculated the time moderators were devoting to their community for things such as removing comments, banning users, and approving posts.

The researchers used data from both the public domain and that provided by a pool of moderators who volunteered for the research to understand how much time the 21,500 or so moderators spent on activities each day.

In total, it emerged that moderators are spending around 466 hours each day on their communities, but the researchers believe this to be at the lower end of their estimation as it is likely that they do a much broader range of tasks than were included in the study. If the median hourly wage for similar services were paid to the moderators it would equate to around $3.4 million of free labor each year.

What’s more, the researchers believe that moderators often lack the tools required to do this work effectively, which is something they hope that their work will help to rectify.

“Volunteers moderators are in such a disadvantaged position when it comes to asking for support,” they conclude. “Our motivation is to introduce needed information into this kind of transaction to ensure that it’s a fair value exchange.”