History Repeats Itself | The Aol Chat Room Monitor Revolt - Priceonomics | September 2014

While the article is 9 years old, it's incredibly relevant today. Towards the end is the paragraph:

As described, Reddit is an interesting example where people voluntarily fill the same community leader role that Aol’s volunteers did, although they do so with fewer restrictions and more agency. That said, while we don’t expect or believe that Reddit should be sued for back wages, it may suffer from the same problem as Aol: Reddit’s fanatical users may remain devoted only as long as the site still feels, as volunteers once described Aol, like a “community where people got together to get together.” Reddit has struggled to ratchet up revenues, likely because users would rebel against aggressive monetization.

This may be the moment we are living through now. Or not, I don't think things have been fully decided yet. But what we have been seeing happen to Reddit really fits Cory Doctorow's Enshitification framework. Reddit's growth was based on providing users with a great way to interact. With the growth of the user base, it became desirable to monetize those users, and Reddit has been trying like mad to do so over the past several years. This isn't necessarily bad. Running a popular website is expensive, and Reddit needs money to cover storage, processing and bandwidth costs. However, that monetization may be reaching the point where the users are noticing it and may be less willing to put up with it.

That said, Reddit probably has a lot of life left in it. It still has (and is generating) a lot of content people want. Right now, those of use who feel strongest about the enshitification of Reddit have made the jump to other places. The question remains, can we build a critical mass of content which starts to peel other users away from Reddit, who are less bothered by the commercialization going on? Only time will tell. There was a time where AOL's position seemed unassailable, then MySpace was king for a time. Even FaceBook has been facing issues retaining users. And, of course, there is the slow moving train wreck which is Twitter. Large, successful social media platforms can fall. Perhaps this will be a repeat of The Great Digg Migration which fed Reddit. Or, maybe not. Maybe this will be another "Chairwoman Pao" moment on Reddit. Where users make a lot of noise for a little bit and then things go back to normal. Only time will tell.

Huh. I didn't realise until the end that this is from 2014, interesting.

That was a good read, thank you.

Here is an AI tldr summary of the article:

• In the 1990s, America Online (AOL) employed thousands of volunteer "community leaders" to monitor chat rooms and message boards.

• In 1999, two former community leaders sued AOL for back wages, arguing they should have been classified as employees. AOL ultimately settled the lawsuit for $15 million in 2010.

• The case highlighted the issue of how to define work in the digital age. The community leaders worked from home on their own computers but were still integral to AOL's services.

• There are modern counterparts to AOL's community leaders, such as Reddit moderators. But companies like Reddit and Facebook have avoided the legal issues AOL faced by being more hands-off with their user-created content and communities.

• Some critics argue companies like Facebook and BuzzFeed take advantage of users by getting them to provide free labor and content that the companies then monetize through advertising. Users get non-monetary rewards like reputation points or "cat power" rather than actual compensation.

• The article questions whether this system is really equitable or sustainable. Companies may risk losing devoted users if they become too aggressive in monetizing user-created content and communities.

• An updated version of the adage "if you're not the customer, you're the product" could be "if you're not the customer, you're the product. And quite possibly the employee." Since users provide value to companies like content and moderation, they could be seen as a type of employee, even if they are not officially paid.

The key themes of the article are:

1. The blurry line between users, volunteers, and employees in the digital age. AOL's community leaders and modern counterparts like Reddit moderators provide value to companies but are not officially employees.

2. The debate over whether companies are unfairly taking advantage of users by profiting from their free labor and content. Some see it as a fair exchange, while others argue it is "digital sharecropping."

3. The risk of companies alienating their users by becoming too aggressive in monetizing the value those users provide. AOL faced backlash, and companies today have to strike a balance.

4. The updated notion of "if you're not the customer, you're the product. And quite possibly the employee." This captures how companies profit from users not just as an audience to sell to advertisers but as a source of labor and content.

Really interesting how what we post and garners attention, only concentrates money in a select few.

I found the example of a pub really interesting. One could see sites like Reddit as something like this. On the other hand, pubs don't use unpaid "volunteers" (at least outside the US) to wait the tables.

In the end the proposition of an online community, made and maintained by the community, seems at odds with making profit. Maybe concepts like Lemmy can fill the gap and each user only has to provide their share to keep their instance running.