[DAO Discussion] Wonderland Moderator Compensation

As a community member, you aren’t able to see much of what we do daily. Some of it is public facing in the form of discord interactions with users, much more of it is behind the scenes. Its understandable that you can only go based on what you can see. I certainly respect your view based on what you are exposed to. Let me give you just a bit of an idea of the other things.

In regards to Sifugate much of what mods did was public-facing. Mods were the only line of defense from the complete self implosion of the protocol. Each of us (even some that are no longer with us), stood their ground when there was no leadership available (because they too were freaking out, receiving death threats etc), we fielded all questions, concerns, and hate. Everything that community members threw at us. If we had packed up our bags and thrown our hands up, giving up, the likelihood that Wonderland would’ve unwound the treasury, would have been high. Post-Sifugate, these problems are still prevalent, just not to the same degree. After the RQ, things are slowly cooling down a bit more. These things were the part you can see mods doing… our outward messages. Though that’s one of the most important parts of the job, it’s what you don’t see that is the majority of the job.

Just a shortlist of tasks that don’t require us to type a message to anyone that we handle behind the scenes:
• Discord problem & resolution
• Compiling user feedback/problems/bugs/sentiment and passing it to the leadership team
• Bot configuration / testing / problem discovery & resolution
• Creating useful bot commands & lists to help users, mods, or devs to do their jobs
• Forum moderation/Governance initiative assistance.
• Compiling protocol information when new initiatives are started by the team
• Finding ways to display or convey that information to educate users
• Finding/creating/purchasing tools to aid us in doing the tasks that need done
• Fielding countless requests for moving from newbie chat to general chat
• Tracking down bad actors
• Combing through hundreds or thousands of messages for people who are fudding/sewing chaos/trying to break the rules
• Banning bad actors
• Reviewing bans from people who swear they aren’t a bad actor, having to make judgement calls in order to protect the community
• Event planning & execution
• When leadership says I’d like to do an AMA, mods are the people who do all the menial work that makes the event go smoothly
• Fielding requests from other teams/protocols etc that want to speak with leadership, and filtering them or setting up meetings when necessary.
• Identifying candidates for mod positions, providing our feedback to leadership
• Managing Queens Guard & Cheshire Cat mods & making sure they have everything they need to do their job
• Struggling to do all of the above due to an acute lack of information provided to us. (one of the things we are working hard to solve)
• Being available 24/7 for emergencies, providing help where needed when needed when these arise.

Much of what we do is side projects to keep the protocol running smoothly. These are things you often do not see or ever know about. These are things, that if left unchecked, would cause the community to eventually cannibalize itself. You only know about things that break or go wrong. We do most of this without much information to go on, as communication with the leadership team has largely been strained at best for us.

… There are more items that we do, and a lot of these things are random & unknown things until the problem shows up. We take on each and every duty and problem that is not covered by other mod roles, including the same work that they do themselves. The problems that don’t fit into a neat box, fall to us, because there’s nobody else after us to take care of them. The dev team & leadership team have their own entire realm of tasks that are needed done, unrelated to managing the community.

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This IS great. but I lost my full-time job on 03/16, I saw this post initially as “Hey we have jobs available”. I could use a job as I have only a job that gives me 8 hours per week.

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I disagree with the premise in your statement challenging the point about the volume of messages from the mod team 'in no way reflects the effort or time you spend’. The community-facing communications (in essence, engaging the community) are visible, tangible, and measurable. They are part of the fundamental functions of community moderators. I’d evaluate this high on the list of core tasks of any mod team, equal with muting and banning users; perhaps we disagree on the level of importance this part plays though?

Totally agree, this is not visible to the layman. In order to better understand the needs of Wonderland mod team, it will be important to begin documenting the effort that this represents so the community can make an informed decision/recommendation/commentary on the topic of compensation.

You’re absolutely correct that it’s only one among many potential metrics, however, as you mentioned, it’s hard to measure, but nothing is impossible to put into numbers so long as you have processes and structure to support this :slight_smile:.

It would be interesting to have some proper market research performed to support this argument. To start off - perhaps we could assess the compensation structure of the Discord mods based off of projects with similar position on Coingecko or Marketcap?

Maybe there’s a smarter way to do this, but this feels closest to an ‘apples to apples’ comparison.

There’s a lot of hard work being done, I don’t think anyone challenges this point, but what you’re asking for is above a single person’s median income in the US, which, all things considered feels like a lot. Obviously it’s impossible to know everyone’s personal situation, but this is enough to live off of in many parts of the world.

Considering the available supply vs current demand for paid Discord mod work - I’m not sure that the value proposition of the mod team justifies compensation at this level just yet. It could certainly get there in time, but the things that are out of your control at this stage are limiting you from attaining this from my point of view.

I’m definitely happy Nal posted this because this is a great discussion we should start having. I don’t think there’s any need to rush to a conclusion though, we should get everything out in the open regarding expectations, requirements, objectives. I would look to any job description you find online as a baseline and adapt it to the specifics of the role. Then, get community consensus on the details and then we can look at settling on a final number.

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This is superb. We’ve needed this for a while now. I have no input at this point other than maybe fleshing out a bit more on how we can establish transparency for the moderator budget.

I would like to see a new wonderland wallet established for this function and have Alice as well as two others be on a 2/3 multisig for that wallet. This would allow for a few things:

  1. Provide ease of access for community members to see and verify the goings on with the moderator budget.

  2. Provide a security net in the event the Senior Moderator role needs to be transferred without notice.

  3. Protects Alice to an extent in regards to anyone thinking they would have access to that wallet if they had access to Alice.

Beyond that, I feel this is a reasonable package. You all are the backbone of this community and deserve to be supported financially for the work you do to keep us together.

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Hah, it took me too much time to write, but I genuinely care about the project, so I’m contributing even if it means taking the opposite stance in some of my commentary.

I would definitely would love to see the full numbers if you have an easy way to retrieve this. I had to go to the manual way of searching discord name vs dates. Long and boring - I hope there’s tooling that simplifies this on your side.

I definitely understand that a lot of the work you’re doing is invisible to the average Wonderland Discord enjoyer. What’s lacking at this stage to make an informed decision is how much effort this truly represents. Do all these topics represent 40 hours of work per week for each of the people in the list or is it 80 hours per week? If it’s beyond a standard work week - shouldn’t we look to growing the mod team to include a wider group?

That’s the data that would be critical for this all to be clear. The community needs to know how much time is spent on average on each of these topics. If we can get that far, the next steps become far easier to justify.

I appreciate the visibility here.

It definitely does - though I recommend that some data be provided to back up this statement. Like I suggested to Bam, some market research with real examples would help the community make an informed decision.

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In that case please do consider them, look at the total messages (bot link Nal provided) and let me know what the expectations are, I’ve personally, for example spend countless hours in newbie chat since before and during the liquidation cascades and provided help and education there, please include that into your metrics, as it counts towards the community service - as I said before I have the most serverwide messages, Gin is second and many of us are high up there. We are more than happy to provide these, but I still do not feel they are the most important metrics tbh.

For compensation comparision (imo):

Mcap wouldn’t be a good stat to compare, I’d compare with server size, and project complexity - but, very small project with less than 40 messages daily pay around $1k per month to their moderators - you could also consider sushi, as mentioned by Alice, but that’d be way higher, with smaller project and smaller community (for example). There are many.

In theory, yes - after paying taxes on that I, for example would be left with less than what a normal 8h job would provide, putting in way more hours and effort, without the benefits a normal job provides such as health insurance and unemployment as well as pension benefits - it’s hard to compare as taxes etc differ, but still a point to consider.

I wish you a good night and am happy to look up some numbers tomorrow :+1:

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I want to touch on your comments. I think every single point that you’ve brought up needs to be addressed and I feel SO lucky to have someone like you in this community. I would like to suggest that we also consider what this pay structure would be if we were already a well functioning community without any issues to resolve. We have major issues now, things I believe, once resolved, will make our outlook on this discussion quite different in hindsight.

I think the mods should definitely work together to bring in some of the data you’re asking for, I’m going to be happy to help with that. This data will make it easier for the community to grasp the scale of the work involved for these positions and the need for these tasks to be done. The people in that list have been doing all of this work as a volunteer until this proposal is passed. Let’s also imagine the effect being paid might have on their continued efforts and results.

I don’t think it would be appropriate to have fleshed it out too much further to include too many others or additional options. Anyone outside that list, including myself - whom I believe have done quite a lot - none of us even pale in comparison to the level of dedication and effort displayed by the Mods in that list. They came into this community in the good times and kept fighting through the bad times. This compensation structure, I believe, is adequate for Them. As we resolve many of our issues and get back to work, if we feel this structure is not feasible, we can revisit it.

This is all to say, I fully agree with your desire to break this conversation down in a meaningful way, but let’s keep some additional considerations in mind. Dissecting this topic will only be beneficial for us in the future.

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Thanks! The MEE6 is super interesting. I did stuff the annoying way by going to the search function and breaking it down by month.

Glad to hear it. I think we can all agree that transparency, visibility, communications in general have underperformed (not due to the mods, mind you - you guys are doing the best you can with the tools/resources at your disposal.

Fair enough. I don’t think anyone is asking for handouts here (well, some in the community begging for mod now might be lol). Community contribution compensation could come at a later date for sure, but in the meantime, I totally understand that the focus should be on the tangible efforts done by the mods today.

Right - this part can become an issue when many of the core functions that 8 of you are being paid for are also shared by unpaid volunteers. I see this as a recipe for disaster unless there’s a follow-up with a path towards paid work for everyone performing these duties.

I believe we need more data on the efforts that go into the work deemed invisible to the community. This helps us understand how the mods are spending their time helping Wonderland and whether the distribution of workload makes sense. I’ve seen comments suggesting that the work is beyond that which goes into a standard 9-5 in by at least 1 mod in Discord. If this is accurate, you guys may need to begin tracking this in a way that the community can verify/validate.

It also allows the community to understand whether the mod team is overworked or if they are under utilized.

I can’t say with much certainty what is ‘fair’ in this context, just that more data is needed to understand the true effort that goes into mod work, but with the information available today - the gut feeling is that the price is steep.

What I meant by the part that you quoted, though, is that as responsibilities are added to the scope of the mod team, that it should follow with additional rewards - I don’t think we should be basing the current pay structure on things that don’t exist yet.

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Hello! I wanted to address one point in your reply to Bamchicka, where you provided a link to state that the compensation requested is higher than the median income in the US. The link leads to a Wikipedia page that says that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2021, the median personal income for workers was $1010 weekly - this translates to $52,520 as the median personal income. Our established salary would be categorized as a “lower-middle class” income in the US. It also needs to be noted that our mod team is international, not US-based, and the average salaries and cost of living varies by location, so that unit of comparison may not be an equal fit for all circumstances. We are also not asking for any benefits packages as with traditional employment, so that must be factored into earnings as well.

As for the other statistics you have asked for, I will begin to work on compiling them tomorrow so they will be ready when this proposal is updated before moving forward! :heart:

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Hi Wilson,

I’ve provided a lot of the answers to the others in previous replies, so I apologize if my response does not adequately reflect the time you put into yours.

I’ll go in a different direction here though as I don’t want to waste your time and have you repeat the same information your colleagues have shared already. Would you be able to share examples/details of your contributions in each of these behind the scenes tasks you’ve described? I understand we have no way to actually validate the accuracy at this stage, but this will help me, and surely others, understand the effort that goes into this work. If you can also give a ballpark for your time spent in your examples, that’d be equally useful.

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Right you are, though I was basing myself on the numbers from the US Census Bureau from 2019, which is just to the right of what you posted (though interestingly, when you go to the Census webpage, they have info for 2020 vs 2019 suggesting that the personal income is around 40k, I guess the Wikipedia guy managing this page has some catching up to do!):

The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median personal income at $35,977 in 2019 with a base year of 2019 for all people over 15 years old.

Which, realistically, is actually going to lead to challenges down the line if it’s not clarified before we agree on a structure. Benefits, or at least, policies around how you’re intending to handle time off should be factored into this proposal as well. To me it would make sense that alongside any monthly earnings, there’s also an expectation of x number of vacation days, as people will inevitably need time away and probably will want to avoid a gap in pay.

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I’ve think what these moderators have accomplished within the short time they have been in position is nothing short of amazing. (I remember when Alice was just an active community member). I was actually a paid moderator/manager in the past for another project and was paid $1250 a month in the projects currency so the suggested amount seems pretty fair to me. I found wonderland through our research of DAOs and believe the structure they have maintained and build out speaks for itself. I think this is a good proposal and support it for the time being, with that being said I believe if and when a new team takes the reigns it should be re assessed to allow the best cohesion between the groups.

To the moderators, alot of yall held it together during what is arguably the roughest times in DeFi (liquidations, sifugate, ect.) and I hope everyone is at least compensated for that, regardless of how this proposal goes. I know first hand the stress, time, even threats that come with the job and just wanted to say the amount of respect I have for yall is extremely high.

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I did, I think you saw it in my initial post. I suppose we now both agree that volume metrics are a part of the story to quantify mod involvement. Looking at it monthly also gives an indication of who is currently very active vs who is not. Where we need to go next is in looking at how to quantify all the tasks invisible to the community to get an idea of effort.

A couple of questions come to mind:

How do we know that 8 is the right number today for the workload that this represents?
Given that we’re only considering paying for 8 mods; if tomorrow all those you’re not paying disappear, are you able to handle the operational workload between the 8 of you?
If not, what’s the true effort required from a human standpoint in order to accomplish the tasks with the same level of quality as is done by the extended team today?

When we can answer these questions, the community will be much better informed on how to take a decision regarding the question surrounding how much it needs to spend in order to fairly compensate the mods.

300k/year seems steep to me for 8 people, but maybe for 12-16 that’s the right number?

While the benefits question is an interesting one for sure; same as my response to Alice earlier, I would highly recommend you factor in vacation/PTO into your compensation structure (like 4-6 weeks of vacation, whatever you think is fair to include). It’s going to be important to plan for this and if you can get ahead of it by writing it into the proposal, it will save you from some headaches (logistically, as well as from the human standpoint).

Health insurance and unemployment/pension is probably best left off the table for now given the challenges this would represent globally. (This is challenging enough in established global organizations, I can only imagine the shitshow if we tried to explore it for WL).

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I am the primary author of the proposal and support it. It’s important to remember that this isn’t a traditional labor market with rules and regulations. Most of us are available 7 days a week for more than 8 hours per day, for example. Upward mobility is virtually non-existent. Lack of employment contracts and the nature of crypto means job security is also low. Total compensation must factor in all these things and I felt 25k per month for the entire team was more than fair.

Wonderland hasn’t been run with a great deal of red tape in the past and our goal isn’t to turn into a governance nightmare with weekly evaluations of moderators and oversight committees. The people selected were picked based on their past performance and value. Allocations are sent to and deployed by the Senior moderator. If one or more is under performing their pay will reflect that. If the Discord server dies down to a level where we 8 people are not needed I personally volunteer to be the first one to step down. Sitting at my computer all day with a duty to watch multiple chat channels and answer questions/empathize with users is less fun than the average person on Discord might think.

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I can’t elaborate for all the different fields Wilson mentioned but I can use my work as an example for a glimpse of what a Wonderland moderator is doing “behind the scenes”.
Not just for you but for all the posts about Discord messages as a relevant metric and in general if this proposal is fair.

Only during this month (and the month is not over yet) behind the scenes,

  • I’ve visualized and updated the timeline for the WIP #5 for users to be able to understand better what’s going on.
  • I’ve tracked all the votes for WIP #5.2 whitelist snapshot, I’ve logged them and I’ve created a website page for users to be able to see if they’re eligible or not for the Redemption, how much wMEMO they whitelisted and how many they’ve claimed at any given moment.
  • I’ve provided numbers/statistics, post Redemption, about Redemption which you can find in Dani’s and Nal X’s announcements so the community can feel and be well informed of what happened.
  • I’ve debugged multiple times the website for issues and errors, providing solutions for the devs and troubleshooting for the community so they can access it, especially during the redemption period.
  • I’ve helped personally a lot, a lot of users with their Whitelist and Redemption problems in DM’s.

Now, you can understand that you can’t measure this kind of contribution easily and most of the above are described by Wilson in just 1 field in 14 words. There are 16 more points to consider.

Every single one of the moderators in this proposal is working much and hard behind the scenes.
Answering somebody’s question in a channel is just the tip of the iceberg.

Also, It’s not really a question of time, these moderators are not just doing 8h swifts like any other regular job, they don’t check the clock and they’re not leaving things for tomorrow or for the next guy to solve.
The only time of the day you don’t see them providing to the community is when they’re sleeping.

I agree that transparency and elaboration about all the aspects of what it is to be a moderator in Wonderland is very important but providing for them is the right thing to do and it is long due.

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I can see most of the people replying here with no problem with this proposal. I have done IT Customer support when I was younger and know what kinda crap you have to take everyday and still have to smile. So you guys got my vote here, 25K mim monthly go and distribute among yourself.

My main issue is Wonderland (whatever.0). It’s been 1 week+ and no focused discussion are being moderated. What’s going on right now? remember not all investors are in discord, I hate discord actually because people there are just spouting ideas like sunday market. SO, please bring all of us back to a focal point in this forum. What’s next? who has the say? is it dani now? who’s proposal are now top priority? which forum post are moving forward? I dont see any of this being moderated. So please, move thing forward since you guys have the unofficial power now to move things forward.

My suggestion is to move things that has been approved first, while bring the proposal one at a time.
Thing that has been approved on and not going anywhere is liquid staking on avalanche. What’s happening here? I thot we already have voted this on early January, what’s the hold up? Then move discussion on simple proposals first like decision to:-

  1. Burn the RQ wmemo, are we burning? are we not? mod the vote on this and execute. DONE
  2. Buy back above Backing price. Are doing it, are not? mod the vote on this and execute. DONE
  3. Build staking program for BSGG. Are we doing it? are we not? mod the vote on this and execute. DONE

and keep piling up the simple decisions first. No need to go for GRANDIOSO decisions like wonderland 2 or bastion whatever or Inverse Bond or whatever yet.

Please moderate on this and get us moving. Thanks for reading.

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This is the future of Wonderland! :sunglasses::ok_hand::muscle::frog:

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Currently Dani is running Wonderland and in process of appointing new treasury manager, new management team and establish a communicator between core team and moderator team. We are thriving to meet expectation of investors and push things forward with direct communication from core team members, updating investors on upcoming implementations and so on.

Rest assure our forum moderators are doing their best in prioritizing proposals according to their importance and which implementations are needed the most in best interest of investors.

This is utmost importance to Dani and quoting from his message in discord general chat is his first priority. (Message link: Discord)

I agree on this as well, these are tasks at hand that the moderator team are working on, get simple things solved for our community, so we will not have to vote on every single small changes and action can be taken swiftly by the core team.

Thank for you taking the time to write your comment, we are very grateful for your support and suggestions.

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Let’s make the community some money first, cause 99% of the people are losing.
Pay the moderator with vested Wmemo instead.

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Can I be a moderator too ? 3K per month will already change my life… and i’m not joking…

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