Yeah, and home cooks do billions of dollars worth of free cooking per year for their friends and family. The fact that something can be valued in dollars doesn't actually mean that it's wrong that it's being done for no monetary compensation. You can put a dollar value on anything, including every constructive hobby, sport, and pastime that people do.
Home cooking doesn't have a single business entity that aggregates this value though. Reddit would be worth much less without this free labor, as well as most other social media companies would without user generated comment.
It also isn't a public service which makes it quite different to me at least. A better analogy might be 'soup kitchen' staff, gurdwara kitchen staff (at least I assume they're volunteers?), church choir & bell-ringers, etc.
Home cooking supports every worker and their children as future labor that aggregates into every business entity. A single business entity is not a requirement for this condition. See the entire underground economy of social reproduction.
Reddit’s core business is the comments, and moderation is a requirement. Some (many?jurisdictions have laws around what can legally be written, so moderation becomes important.
Cooking food isn’t the core business of my employer.
I mean I guess we can define core business whichever way we want, but if unpaid labor vanished overnight the entire economy would collapse so it actually is fundamentally connected to Reddit whether we like it or not.
What it means though is that the people doing the work are often doing it due to power tripping, political axe grinding or outright being paid by other organizations to astroturf their viewpoints.
Nothing is actually "free" and reddit isn't getting free moderation, there's a cost to that which shows up in the quality of the moderation.
It is sort of similar to the aphorism that if the product is "free" that you are really the product. The moderation (at least on large subreddits) comes at a cost, it just isn't a direct financial cost that reddit pays.
This comparison is moot. Home cooking isn't voluntary work in any sense, nor is it in any public interest. Its ensuring your _family_ has dinner. The alternatives (such as takeaway) are each more expensive.
The problem with your take is that free, public labor devalues paid, public work. This is also why its difficult to compete with 'free' services such as 'free email'.
