Are steam moderators and moderators in general paid?

[Pointless.]

title. i always wondered. or is it some kind of "nice deed" ? i only wanna know because its like.. a shower thought i guess.

[Wolf Knight]

game hub moderators are appointed by that games developer/publisher. they can be paid employees or volunteers.

the general forums are only moderated by paid moderators. steam retired all the volunteer mods

[Pointless.]

damn that must be epic if you think about it. being paid to "watch" over the forums. well thanks!

[Aachen]

Originally posted by Pointless.:

damn that must be epic if you think about it. being paid to "watch" over the forums. well thanks!

Paid to deal with the worst and most obnoxious toxic nonsense people can invoke? At least volunteers aren’t beholden to a paycheck.

[Pointless.]

yea but you can set the limit of what is too much and punish him anyway.

[Aachen]

I don’t understand to whom you refer.

[Pointless.]

to Moderators... if someone pushes it too much with bad behaving they can ban them..

[cinedine]

Originally posted by Pointless.:

damn that must be epic if you think about it. being paid to "watch" over the forums. well thanks!

It's anything but.
You are basically watching the neverending list of reports and have to act upon them.
Given that Steam has outsourced the moderation to a service company, you most likely also have some perfomance indicators to fulfill, like "100 reports per day". (Which given an 8 hour shift is ridiculously low ;). It's basically the same as working in a call-center.
It's definitely not getting paid for lurking the forums and occasionally posting a warning or brandishing the ban hammer for the one troll you encounter per week.

Anybody who voluntarily does that in a community as big as Steam - which is full of trolls and idiots by virtue of sheer numbers alone - has some issues to compensate for in my opinion.
Getting paid to do that isn't any better if that is all you do.

[Supafly]

Originally posted by Pointless.:

yea but you can set the limit of what is too much and punish him anyway.

Paid mods doing stuff like that would get in trouble and could be disciplined. Possibly suspension or termination

[Mad Scientist]

Originally posted by Pointless.:

damn that must be epic if you think about it. being paid to "watch" over the forums. well thanks!

Only good thing is not having to travel.

[Vote Quimby]

I modded one big forum when I was young. But now hell no, even if I get payed it's a no no.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Pointless.:

damn that must be epic if you think about it. being paid to "watch" over the forums. well thanks!

No, just no.
I was part of the volunteer Moderator group that Valve retired.
I would not do it as a paid Mod. Doing it for free meant that I could choose when to moderate. Which made it enjoyable. I burned myself out on doing reports more than a couple of times too.

You get to see the worst and I've quite literally heard every single insult at least 100 times over. It just becomes white noise pretty quickly.
Some of the things I've seen in art section also was something I did not need to see.

Doing it as a job would be rather soul crushing.

[Aachen]

Originally posted by Zefar:

.... Doing it for free meant that I could choose when to moderate. Which made it enjoyable. I burned myself out on doing reports more than a couple of times too ....

FWiW, this is primarily what I was driving at when I mentioned “beholden to a paycheck.”

Thanks for bringing your past experience into the discussion, though, Zefar.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Pointless.:

damn that must be epic if you think about it. being paid to "watch" over the forums. well thanks!

Content moderation is like Beta testing, the kind of job that seems interesting from the outside but really dull and boring, even mentally stressful when actually doing it.

TBH I did moderation because it was a volunteer task and it was done in my own terms. As a paid job? I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

Content moderation is also a job which can have a real high psychological toll.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382

Originally posted by cinedine:

Anybody who voluntarily does that in a community as big as Steam - which is full of trolls and idiots by virtue of sheer numbers alone - has some issues to compensate for in my opinion.

Love you all guys

[bnuuy]

Depends entirely on the hub/company. A larger company will usually contract out their player satisfaction division to another company (there's entire companies dedicated to hiring out agents for gaming customer support).

those will handle QA, customer support and social media moderation. Those are indeed paid roles-- if you're interested in potentially becoming a GM or forum moderator, hitmarkerjobs sometimes has listings :)

but as other said, it really depends on the hub. Most studios don't have a budget for this and will either take on volunteers OR have existing employees handle Steam hubs.


as others said, mad respect/kudos to everyone who volunteers for this kind of work! larger companies actually have therapy programs/discounts for employees because you see some incredibly horrifying content sometimes. grateful to everyone who has spared the rest of us from seeing that.

[Snapjak]

I want to say that back during the SPUF days the volunteer mods seemed more... upbeat in their posts and their handling of infractions.

That also may be partially my memory of people like ... crap what was his name.. the one that would swoop in on the VAC forum and spell out what some idiot got banned for. Anyways, people like him who were allowed to actually voice their moderation.



BurtonJ! That's it.