The terms of service for reddit are based on California law. Based on liberal Laws of California, I would venture to guess that there is some grounds for back pay. I was wondering about this with all the discussion around volunteer moderators.
Similar to Uber drivers, the test for independent contractors is pretty difficult to meet in California nowadays. So I believe there is a solid case (cough class action cough). Fuck reddit. They deserve all the backlash and a mod class action for backpay would be legendary.
I don’t understand how mods could argue they deserve backpay. They are volunteers, are we saying that all volunteers can sue for backpay?
It’s more about the principle. He’s saying that they can’t provide reddit for free, they’re not a charity. But with the same logic, should mods work for free, since they’re also not a charity?
No, they shouldn’t. When subs reach a certain member threshold modding becomes a job for many. Mods should absolutely form a union, but asking for back pay is a stretch. What they should do is asked to be paid moving forward stating that profiting off the backs of volunteers is no longer acceptable not only because Reddit has made modding much harder by giving third party apps the finger, but also because the mods should in theory value their spare time. Another thing is that people posting free content to Reddit without reimbursement should be viewed as an atrocity, even YouTube reimburses content creators once the content gets a certain amount of views.
Negociation 101: ask for more than you actually expect to get (within reason, you don’t want people to think you are a joke).
They ask for backpay not really expecting for backpay, just to give them wiggle room to settle in court for better rights from that moment on.
Last and only time I had to sue someone (and won) my lawyer told me what the usual result of cases like mine is, then we asked for that and like, 20% extra. Then on the mediation we “negociated” for the amount we were really expecting to get.
(This is all personal speculation, Im not a mod, clearing that up just in case).
Pretty sure the courts will view volunteer work that enriches a non profit very differently from “volunteer” work that enriches a for profit enterprise.
they don’t have a contract, they’re screwed.
California has many of laws on the books which grandfather workers under various statutes of de facto employment. Even contracts can be voided. No contract is necessary for an employment relationship to exist.
and reddit has it in their TOS that no one who is a mod is an employee of reddit.
That’s a point in favor of reddit, but a small one. As my company’s labor lawyer enjoys saying, “You can’t contract around the law.” Meaning, an agreement can be nullified by a court that finds the agreement is in violation of a law.
Right, but you also can’t create a work agreement where one was explicitly denied. It’s like mowing your neighbors lawn then asking them to pay you, but they told you they wouldn’t pay you if you did it before you started. It’s the same with the 3rd party app devs too. While I think reddits actions are insane and detrimental to the health of the site, they are fully in their right to deny those devs access to their API and their site as a whole.
You don’t need a contract to sue someone in California. There are labor laws meant to cover situations that are inequitable or unfair. In my mind, having mods do all this work for the benefit of reddit (eg. Free labor) is unfair and seemingly rises to a level that should be investigated.
yeah, but you need one to win.
Realistically, I don’t think this will go anywhere. While Reddit’s use of free moderators to do the bulk of the work might raise eyebrows, they’ve been very clear about the fact that moderation is a volunteer effort, rewarded with “status” as a moderator and greater control of the communities moderated.
However…
Going forward, Reddit moderators should absolutely collectively bargain for pay, refusing to moderate unless Reddit pays them fairly for their efforts. I think I saw somewhere that the average moderator spends around 20 hours a week moderating (could be remembering wrong) so asking for equitable pay would be a way to deprive Reddit of millions of dollars of unpaid labor. Worst that happens there for the fediverse is that they agree, though.
refusing to moderate unless Reddit pays them fairly for their efforts
What will really happen: new mods will be put in their place instead, willing to do the dirty work for free because they don’t get the protest. They will probably be worse than the people they replaced and they will not defend their communities against the further changes the website will bring. This will kill Reddit as we know it, but it won’t happen overnight, it will take months or even years, every community slowly draining away its goodwill while users organize new communities elsewhere, be it Lemmy or wherever else. At that point, Reddit will become a news aggregator or a boring social media websites closer to tiktok than it is to the discussion centered place it is now. And we won’t be there to really see it under that new guise, just like I had to check to see that digg.com has now become a sad flipboard clone.
And that’s a perfectly acceptable outcome! If Reddit dies like Digg, Tumblr, and now Twitter have done, then I’m okay with that and I imagine that most of us here are too. If Reddit’s new mods are low quality, then illegal content will become more prevalent and they’ll risk, at the very least, public censure for their enabling of [insert illegal stuff here.] But you’re right… Reddit is not likely to die overnight. It’ll take time measured in years.
How’d they calculate how much is owed though? I’ve been through ups and downs when I did modding and it’s not a consistent amount of time spent. And I don’t think every mod would be eligible, would they? I’m sure some small niche sub that barely needs moderating would be very different from a large hot sub like r/news or r/politics.
Not a bad idea. Even in the case it doesn’t have a solid legal ground (I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know), I believe it’s still a good way to scare off investors and show what happens when you s*hit too much on your own free labor.
20 years ago in Hallissey et al v. America Online, Inc., AOL ended up settling for $15 million for 2000 “volunteers”. It’s not a perfect situation match, but there is some precedent (not in the legal sense, having been a settlement).
Considering how they couldn’t keep up the protest going because of threats of removal as moderators, I highly doubt they will achieve anything. People apparently need Reddit and they’ll do whatever to have it no matter the cost.
Yeah I don’t understand why some subs didn’t migrate to a Lemmy instance and then shut the sun down. Like, antiwork and workreform are primed to be a federated community out of billionaires control…
I think we might see more migration after the Reddit apps die on July 1st
why some subs didn’t migrate to a Lemmy instance
Some subs are definitely doing it, check here: https://sub.rehab/ and here: http://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
Some subs will need more time to organize probably, some will probably stay on reddit, but that’s ok, it’s users that have to move first and foremost, power users and content creators specifically.
If they were bound to a union it could be different, but that’d require people be willing to enter a union contract in return for collective bargaining power.
This will go nowhere, however if it were to try to go somewhere, Mods would need to enter legally binding agreements to abide by union rules.
That meaning, if the union votes to private your stuff, to shut down scripts, etc, you can be held liable to some extent or another.
Right now, these protests are largely people pussyfooting, jumping in, and when the water gets a little hot, screaming “oh no” and hopping out. This cannot happen if you want to effectively collectively bargain. Scabs cannot be amongst those united. There can be no question on loyalties.
It’s not gonna happen, but it’d be hella interesting if it did.
Good luck with that lol
