What do you call a multimillion-dollar, for-profit company that’s run in large part by unpaid or underpaid grunt laborers? A century ago, you might’ve dubbed it robber-barony or sharecropping — if not, you know, outright slavery.
In 2015, though, we call it the social Web: a glorious dystopia where everybody works for likes — as in, “for free” — while a handful of tech tycoons profit.
Never has this been clearer than in the past month, as Reddit — a private company that recently accepted $50 million in venture funding — quelled an uprising among the volunteers who actually run the site: its moderators.