FAO Night Watch: please stop letting Mumsnet exploit you!

[myotherusernamesarebetter]

Mumsnet is a business, not a charity or voluntary organisation. There is no justification for using volunteers.

I urge the Night Watch to rethink their choice to help out a commercial business who should be using paid moderators.

They might also like to have a little read of the rules on minimum wage and what constitutes volunteering.

I agree with that.
Particularly what if anything you as an individual would be held accountable for needs to be spelled out.

Agreed! Pay your workers.

Hard agree. It's outrageous to use volunteers.

How do we know they use actual volunteers

And who the hell volunteers to work all night for free

They are. It’s a team. They are up at night for various reasons, and have a limited range of tools they can use to help while the paid team are not around.

Last night’s shenanigans clarified that it isn’t an acceptable situation.
The volunteers are exposed to various degrees of unpleasant experiences, and last night it will have been criminal and traumatic and entirely inappropriate that they held any level of responsibility for it.

I hope they are properly supported through this.

It’s a well known fact and has been the case for years.

And thank you, Night watch team, for your work up to this point.

I think the organisation of this size shouldn’t rely on volunteers especially in a question of site safety. There should be proper system in place. It should be a matter for professionals.

What happened last night? What did I miss that we need to protect them from?

Its the internet, lots of us are posting from different time zones .

Seconded!

Have now seen. Awful stuff.

Yes agreed. It's always been a bad system but the volunteers themselves were exposed to unacceptable levels of risk last night.

Presumably paid managers manage the volunteers? Is there any reliable information available about the mumsnet system?

Can someone actually say, or link, what has happened please?

Just click on Site Stuff and read previous threads.

Another stupid thing is that because the Night Watch are volunteers, I don’t think they actually see reports made overnight. People need to know they exist and go to the Night Watch section of Mumsnet to flag things to them - but that’s not explained to people using the report function out of hours.

Ah! That I never knew
@myotherusernamesarebetter

I’d also put it to MN that it’s a sign of bad service design if your service relies on users knowing how it works internally (like with my example of the report function not being the way to report things at night). They shouldn’t have to.

I believe there is no one on the payroll overnight UK time.

It is amazing that they still use volunteers. The system dates from a time when MN was smaller and moderation was primarily about moderating community members when they broke site rules. It kind-of made sense that people who were themselves community members were in a good position to make temporary holding responses to community difficulties.

MN isn't a community anymore, it is a huge aggregation of posters unknown to each other. Additionally, the direction of the internet means that moderation is primarily about removing externally generated harms. Predominantly automated spam but also other and more terrible abuses.

I'm pretty amazed to learn today that volunteers are still relied on. I wonder why on earth people take on this role. I could see the appeal when MN was a community. It was just the same kind of pro-social behaviour that you see in real-life communities -- like being the one who bothers to tidy the toy cupboard at a toddler group. But it is odd now.

It's known as others have said

Agree pay them and put in proper processes so they are not harmed by dealing with what they had to deal with last night

Precisely!!

Also, what is MN's definition of 'overnight'?

For how many hours - from x pm to y am - is the site staffed by volunteers only?

Not having at least one paid moderator on the Nightshift is madness.