We should but i dont want to. I'd rather donate to the instance and they can make that choice. But unfortunately most of the money goes to running costs.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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Unpopular Opinion
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Just pay for the hosting costs instead.
The risk is that you'll end up with people who seek out mod roles for the money, spin up legions of alts (more than they do now) and do all kinds of bullshit to game the system. If there's a flat payout, a top mod could inflate the team and double(+) dip to make sure they get the pie slice they want. If it's activity-based, run a handful of bots to break the rules at a time of your choosing and get whack-a-mole points.
If only certain communities qualified for paid moderation (based on activity levels, for example), this could add an incentive to sabotage other related communities and drive traffic to the one a bad actor controls. If all communities qualify, maybe we get massive fragmentation as everybody decides to try and carve out a niche for their mini-job.
That's just a start, lots of other ways it could go sideways or be manipulated. I think we're better off with people who want to keep the spam to a dull roar and prevent heated discussions from getting too out of hand because they want to provide people with usable communities instead of dangling a couple dollars in front of them.
Once you start to go down that rabbit hole, you'll start to see that Lemmy didn't really fix any of the problems that a lot of people had with Reddit. Lemmy is just a Reddit clone where anyone can be their own spez.
A moderator recently stepped down following what was considered unrealistic rule
That would have never happened on Reddit
I've seen that happen on Reddit in smaller subs.
Unfortunately yes the problems Reddit had are still here. I was hoping there would be clear rules about what is allowed and not and those rules were enforced fairly, and people giving a chance to argue against unfair actions. Apparently that's not the case. It's like ancient greece, if you get ostracized if you are unpopular at any moment.
And according to other posts instead of expanding the reach they're busy reducing the reach of lemmy, De federating sites and otherwise cheering on kicking people off that they disagree with politically. I think that's a mistake, because there is a lot of agreement on a lot of issues even when we disagree on other issues. And it helps to not withdraw into an echo chamber with an inaccurate View of the situation like everybody did in 2024 when Kamala Harris was anointed without contacts.
people giving a chance to argue against unfair actions. Apparently that’s not the case.
A moderator recently stepped down following what was considered unrealistic rule
That would have never happened on Reddit
We see the same posts, and I can block people myself.
But sometimes the posts you remove yourself are quite horrible and disgusting, no?
I never saw any gorish thing so far, only stupid people. Do you have an example?
This place has been spammed to death with child porn on a few occasions
Yeah but how often do OPs delete their own content? Not usually. They keep them up for those upvotes (or downvotes) and even double posts.
It you see posts multiple times maybe switch to scaled or new for a change. You can go back to top or active later when scaled is not interesting anymore.
And i dont think its good if everyone would delete their posts, because what if i need to find a meme/conversation that would be gone if everyone deletes their stuff
But doubling posts can be annoying but its a price i am willing to pay
I'm going to have to say no, as much as it'd be nice to.
As someone has said, it'd just be ruined because someone would game it for themselves. It is already bad enough as to what happens when moderators and even admins go rogue on the communities they're to uphold when they're not paid. Imagine what it'd be like if they were paid, they'd just justify it.
The problem with anything and everything is the human element. Adding money to that problem is like adding accelerant to a fire.
We have the voting system to weigh in on what should be more visible and less visible. I want to believe it can work. If I give up on the idea that a crowd can collectively self regulate content without giving all power to a small group, then there's no point for me to be on lemmy. I can stand sometimes seeing things I don't want to see if the system generally works.
In my experience a lot of toxicity comes from those mods.