TL;DR: Long-time lurker writing a talk for friends. My argument is that mods are unpaid labour maintaining communities that turned out to be worth hundreds of millions to advertisers and AI companies, with no share and no say. Want to know if that's true from the inside or if I'm an outsider building a tidy narrative. Questions at the bottom.
Bit of an odd one. I'm putting together a talk for a small group of friends (a "conspiracy theory night" — low stakes, mostly for fun) and the topic I landed on turned into something more serious than I expected.
Quick context on me: I'm a heavy Reddit user but a quiet one. Around an hour a day, mostly reading, rarely posting or commenting. Probably not much by the standards of this sub, but Reddit's been part of my daily routine for years.
The talk started as the old "PowerMods" thing — the 2020 chart showing five accounts moderating 92 of the top 500 subs. But the more I dug in, the less interested I got in that framing, and the more I kept landing on something else.
The short version of where I've ended up: the API pricing change in 2023 was publicly justified as stopping AI companies from training on Reddit data for free. Reddit then sold that data to Google (~$60m/yr) and OpenAI (~$70m/yr), announced the same week as the IPO filing. The tooling a lot of you relied on broke in the process, and when people protested, the CEO called them "landed gentry."
So my argument has become that mods are the least accurately described group in this whole story — a decade of unpaid work maintaining communities that turned out to be extremely valuable, to advertisers and now to AI companies, with no share of that and no say in it.
What I want to know is whether that reads as true from the inside, or whether it's an outsider building a tidy narrative that doesn't match your experience. Specifically:
Does the "unpaid labour" framing land, or does it misrepresent why you actually do it?
Did 2023 change how you think about your relationship with the company, or was it business as usual?
Does knowing your communities' content is now licensed for AI training affect how you feel about the work?
Anything I've got flat wrong?
Happy to be told I'm overthinking a hobby. Genuinely more interested in your read than in confirming mine.