this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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Yeah. It's kinda crazy how Reddit has just offloaded their moderation to unpaid volunteers and managed to have very few people complain about this.
Moderation of pretty much all traditional forums is done by volunteers, a practice that naturally extended to reddit and Lemmy. Perhaps it's even more logical in the reddit format, since it's the users who create and take responsibility for their subreddit, rather than having a centralised "government" deciding how to organise and moderate the place.
Wikipedia’s content is also 99% volunteer-made and volunteer-moderated.
But moderation of centralised social media is usually done by paid workers. Subreddits are not independent forums; Reddit admins interfere all the time, and they're hosted on Reddit servers so ultimately are at the mercy of Reddit's decisions.
I don't think Wikipedia contributions are comparable to subreddit moderation. Moderation is known for being traumatising work (see: lawsuits from global south workers over PTSD from seeing CSAM, snuff, and other traumatising content when doing underpaid moderation work) and I don't think there are many moderators who do it for fun. They may do it voluntarily because they like a community or think their subreddit/forum is a valuable resource they want to maintain. But not because the labour of moderation itself is fun. Meanwhile I imagine most Wikipedia contributors do so because they are interested in the topic, and it's far less likely to expose editors to traumatising content.
No, quite the contrary.
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter... have paid moderators. That's a small number of massive social media sites. Forums, including their descendants in the form of reddit and Lemmy, and IRC chatrooms with their descendants in Discord and Telegram channels, are primarily user-moderated (with paid admins intervening in more complex situations when needed). Even Facebook offers groups that function like this. Number-wise the latter sites are way more numerous (but with a smaller userbase), and historically older (if it's not too pretentious to speak of the history of the internet). They are the default. So my point is that reddit didn't offload the work, because nobody (especially in the early years) thought that it was reddit's work in the first place, it's just providing a large playground and you do the rest.
The traumatising part of moderation is dealing with child porn and similar, which is not much of an issue on traditional forums and chatrooms, and tbh I don't think it is on reddit either. The worst the traditional mods deal with is harassment if they come across some aggressive loony.
Idk, I used to moderate two (rather tame) subforums, it was kind of like picking up trash from the ground and throwing it in the bin – not super pleasant by itself, but satisfaction came from knowing that the place is a bit better off than before.