Lol, depends on the group and mod level. Yeah, the overall Tiktok and Insta moderators get paid (poorly) to do their job, but do subreddit and individual sever Discord mods get paid?

If we’re talking about Fediverse, maybe the mods of an instance would get paid, but I can bet most Fedi mods rn aren’t being paid, they do it for love.

The biggest point is this:

a team with tonnes of support from the get go, both each other and mental health services etc as a bare minimum

There was a post the other day about protesting Tiktok mods who talked about the horrifying amounts of gore and NSFL stuff they had to remove from the service, getting no support nor concern for their well-being from Tiktok. So you can absolutely pay someone (although not well probably, even for a billion dollar company), but all the money in the world won’t erase looking at 300 beheading videos.

I think the biggest thing helping the Fediverse is the fact that it’s fragmented and not meant to get too big per instance. No one is ever gonna have to moderate millions of accounts like big tech does. Mods can suspend sign-ups and set their own limits. We could make a pretend scenario where each instance is only 1K people, which is far easier than what YT and Insta have to do.