[anonred]

At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage a high-profile subreddit than deal with the unpredictability of volunteer moderators. That’s ultimately where this is heading.

[milesvp]

IMDB tried this at one point and the quality of the moderation plummetted. Same people, they just decided to pay them. It seems to be related to some phsych behavior I’ve read about in behavioral economics. Similar to daycares that add monitary penalties to being late for pickup then have more late parents. It’s like it turns it into a chore somehow adding money into the equation. I’d like to think reddit might know not to fall into this problem, but I suspect you’re right that they will likely just try to pay people thinking it will solve their problems.

[atchoo]

Yup, "Operant Conditioning".

The more appropriate study is the one where rewarding children for drawing leads to a decrease in drawing compared to groups that were not promised rewards. What they did for fun and intrinsic rewards becomes less appealing when it becomes about extrinsic rewards.

I'm not sure what the theory is behind the mechanism i.e. why are intrinsic/extrinsic rewards not additive? Why does the extrinsic reward dominate and why is it less effective and less sustainable than intrinsic rewards?

After looking at a bunch of these behavioural experiments that often use money as an easy to implement reward or punishment - I suspect there is something just straight up "funny" about money. It contains some type of hidden resentment and pain. It's bribery to do something distasteful. It's compensation for damage. There is something unfair and insufficient about exchanging it for non-fungible life. There is something about it that poisons the exchanges it is involved in.

[winter_blue]

They did an experiment with rats recently as well, where the experimenter played hide-and-seek with the rats (with his fingers in a maze of some kind). It turned out the rats were way more engaged versus when they did tasks for a reward.

It’s really fascinating stuff.

I wonder if the principle applies to dogs as well.

[LegitShady]

>At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage

if this was a profitable and beneficial endeavour it would already work this way. The reason moderation still lies in the community's hands (to whatever degree it does) is because reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users and many tens of thousands of large subreddits and this is not $15/h but millions of dollars in costs per month that is currently being donated by community members to a large for profit company.

It also adds a layer of deniability for reddit - "we didn't do it, that moderator did it" etc. You can see what the response to moderation is on twitter and figure out how valuable not having to deal with it yourself is.

Your solution isn't scalable with profit.