The risk is that you'll end up with people who seek out mod roles for the money, spin up legions of alts (more than they do now) and do all kinds of bullshit to game the system. If there's a flat payout, a top mod could inflate the team and double(+) dip to make sure they get the pie slice they want. If it's activity-based, run a handful of bots to break the rules at a time of your choosing and get whack-a-mole points.

If only certain communities qualified for paid moderation (based on activity levels, for example), this could add an incentive to sabotage other related communities and drive traffic to the one a bad actor controls. If all communities qualify, maybe we get massive fragmentation as everybody decides to try and carve out a niche for their mini-job.

That's just a start, lots of other ways it could go sideways or be manipulated. I think we're better off with people who want to keep the spam to a dull roar and prevent heated discussions from getting too out of hand because they want to provide people with usable communities instead of dangling a couple dollars in front of them.

Once you start to go down that rabbit hole, you'll start to see that Lemmy didn't really fix any of the problems that a lot of people had with Reddit. Lemmy is just a Reddit clone where anyone can be their own spez.

We see the same posts, and I can block people myself.

Just pay for the hosting costs instead.

We have the voting system to weigh in on what should be more visible and less visible. I want to believe it can work. If I give up on the idea that a crowd can collectively self regulate content without giving all power to a small group, then there's no point for me to be on lemmy. I can stand sometimes seeing things I don't want to see if the system generally works.

We should but i dont want to. I'd rather donate to the instance and they can make that choice. But unfortunately most of the money goes to running costs.

In my experience a lot of toxicity comes from those mods.

How would their pay be funded?