Good.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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Technology
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Good. I hope i can restart my monthly donations soon again.
I mean, Wikipedia still refused to recognise the union. They have to now given the results of the vote. And I'm sure they get more than enough in donations anyway. They did before the dispute with their workers, and I doubt enough people boycotted Wikipedia over it for it to mean that Wikipedia can't cover their costs.
Wikipedia is flooded with donations. They are super corrupt. Do not give them more money.
If not them, who? I don't know of any project that comes close to Wikipedia, and as someone who doesn't know anything about their internal politics (although I'm open to learn), I feel like it would be a bigger tragedy if it went under. It seems to benefit from being independently funded instead of either being absorbed by some corporation with other motives, or being replaced by a product from some corporation.
Here is an article about the issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/issues
There was a great graph which I cannot find about how Wikimedia (Wikipedia owners) is hoarding massive amounts of money and doing unnecessary fundraisers. Their capital has bloated to infinity. Wikimedia already is a corporation.
To top it off their owners are Zionists who tried to use their influence to stop the Wikipedia page calling Gaza a genocide but failed.
I read through the page and I understand the problem better, but I still don't know what I could do differently as an occasional donator. I found this for helping with development, but I'd prefer to support with donations since I don't really have time for more dev work. Is there some way to donate directly for the operating costs, or to volunteers, or something?
If Reddit mods weren’t imbeciles they could get in on this
O.o No? This was employees of the company, not volunteers who submit changes or watch for accuracy. Mods are in no way shape or form employees of Reddit, other than employees who also just happen to mod a subreddit, they are volunteers.
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.
usually
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.
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter... have paid moderators.
Yes, so the biggest centralised social medias that run most of the modern web. Of which Reddit is a part.
tbh I don't think it is on reddit either.
Really depends on what you moderate. Some subreddits deal with culture war warriors sending rape threats, doxxing, brigading, etc. I used to mod a subreddit where another mod had to delete her account because she was doxxed by kiwifarms.
I think admins are the ones that are paid by reddit.
Mods are mostly bought propagandist on the most popular subreddits. Ghislaine Maxwell was a Reddit mod ffs.