  Online volunteers are a crucial labor force that keeps many for-profit
systems afloat (e.g. social media platforms and online review sites). Despite
their substantial role in upholding highly valuable technological systems,
online volunteers have no way of knowing the value of their work. This paper
uses content moderation as a case study and measures its monetary value to make
apparent volunteer labor's value. Using a novel dataset of private logs
generated by moderators, we use linear mixed-effect regression and estimate
that Reddit moderators worked a minimum of 466 hours per day in 2020. These
hours amount to 3.4 million USD a year based on the median hourly wage for
comparable content moderation services in the U.S. We discuss how this
information may inform pathways to alleviate the one-sided relationship between
technology companies and online volunteers.
