Apparently, based on the way the Seeking Employment forum here looks, the new service to buy/sell for cash is moderator/admin jobs. Is this something that is done regularly now? Is this something you (for board owners) would consider or something (for others) you'd consider doing for money yourself?
I'd expect to see people paying for specific jobs, on a one-time basis, even for people to post on a forum, and perhaps even staff members on a graphics or development team on a site. But hiring and paying general moderators/admins of a community? What is the benefit of this over hiring within a community or finding people interested enough to do it for free, because it's a hobby or they like the niche that much? Does that not happen anymore?
I'm interested in having this discussion, so I figured a topic here could be helpful rather than derailing every thread in SE that applies. Thoughts?
I've never paid for general moderators, but I have paid for people who I hire to be more of "community managers". These roles had the intention of allowing me to be hands off in most of the day to day operations of the forum, which was why I thought it was fair to pay them a small amount.
I think the hiring of general moderators and admins is something that tends to happen in smaller communities, especially that are newer, and don't have many internal candidates they can pull from to fill the roles.
It depends on the niche and how large the communities are. For a community of 1,000 members and a general forum I wouldn't think of paying staff in cash. I would give perks.
I may pay in cash for graphic/coding/developers because they spend hours working on things, but that's also if they were fulfilling requests and etc.
if money is being made off the forums (which are presumably a pretty huge source of ad views for a lot of sites?), the mods should be compensated. They’re providing a challenging, often unrewarding service that increases the value of the site. A lot of people argue that it’s not like a real job, you aren’t held to the same standards, you can quit whenever you want, and so on.
The moderators take the front line, dealing with angry users, possible harassment, the stress of a community potentially falling apart on your watch, long thankless hours of dealing with frustrating forum politics. That shit is exhausting, and it can do a serious number on your emotional and physical health. The moderators get overwhelmed and quit - which they can do without notice, since they aren’t paid. The crisis spirals, and the community falls apart. If you’re lucky, it gets stitched back together in weeks or months. If not, it’s done.
Neither one of those is a great outcome. In one, you’re spared the consequences, but you’re letting your volunteers absorb the damage without compensation and sometimes without thanks, regardless of the personal cost to themselves. In the other, you’re abdicating all responsibility for your own forums and accepting the consequences.
And either way, you end up with a lot of churn, either because your moderators quit at the first sign of trouble, or because they’re quit when the toll on them gets too high.
Sometimes that’s unavoidable - if a site isn’t making any money and a community wants to exist, there’s obviously a need for volunteer mods. But when a site is profitable and the issue is that it might be less so if it paid its mods, then it’s absolutely abusing unpaid labor because it can get away with it.
