“There are surely some content moderators that haven't suffered mental health problems connected to the job, but I haven't met them,” says sociologist and computer scientist Milagros Miceli, who has studied the content moderation industry for the past six years. “I have no doubt that content moderation, like coal mining, is a hazardous job.” Coal mining, known for the proliferation of ‘black lung disease', is a classic example of a hazardous job, but there are only approximately 200,000 coal (…)
I have repeatedly gotten into trouble when I expressed my sexuality online (example), so now I rarely even hint at it except with a handful of friends. That is the main reason why I had not told anybody about my volunteer work on NSFW subcommunities until now.
Looking back, I almost get angry thinking about how poorly compensated I was for my work. Had I only been moderating a few quiet subcommunities, then yeah, I would not ask for much. But I was moderating, I don’t know, around a dozen subcommunities that got decent amounts of daily traffic; they took a lot of tidying and sometimes attracted toxic users. I think that I deserved a little more than three or four bucks a month (through Patreon) and a bunch of fatuous ‘awards’ in the form of commodified icons.