- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
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Fuck spez
I mean, credit where it’s due. If not for him, I’d probably be browsing Reddit right now instead of Lemmy. So, there’s that.
It just got so bad. I can’t imagine how terrible it is now. I would love to see post pandemic stats.
I still surf both. Unpopular, I know, but Lemmy does not yet have the super niche communities that barely exist on reddit.
Imo, it’s about the same. Some subs have gotten worse, some have gotten better, but that’s how it’s always been.
I do Google search for specific beer questions.
Example: Reddit+Syracuse NY+best breweries
That’ll give me good info without having to get on Reddit.
If you use the
site:reddit.comoperator, you might get better luck, since it automatically excludes any sites that aren’t Reddit.Protip: set up a macro to type out site:reddit.com if you can’t be fucked to type after every search.
That’s good for sure. I still enjoy browsing those many nice communities unfortunately… I definitely search for stuff like that when I need to find specific things.
Same, lemmy first, but I visit my favorite game subreddit daily too, I try not to comment or vote, not that it matters in the end.
Every once in a while I pop in just to see the homepage. The content isn’t super great anymore. Honestly, the best stuff on Reddit are all the old threads about things.
Also, there are some small interest communities that’s just don’t have a good presence on Lemmy right now. It enough people here. For example, the community for my city, which is a major US metro, has like 3 active people here.
They’re all faked for the IPO grift.
The default front page subs are the same brainrot they’ve always been, and the niche early 2000s anime subs are still as great as they’ve always been
Say what you want about Adolf Hitler, but he did kill Adolf Hitler.
🪙
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Came here for the fuck spez. Was not disappointed.
Fuck spez
That depends, how much is he paying me to do so?
ew
Eh, for 190 million USD, I’d do it.
I’d do it for 200k, and not a penny less
Well if you need the money that badly, then I won’t stop you.
Fuck spez
I genuinely don’t understand how we, as a society, reached a point where delusional businessmen like this exist. What can he possible do, to justify earning this much money, while his company is literally failing in real time
Unfettered capitalism.
Time to tax the corporations and the wealthy for their fair share again.
Want to solve almost all our problems? Redistribute wealth from the 1% who spend it on yachts to the rest of us to spend on healthcare, wages, etc.
Small business owner making 6 figures a year? I am not talking about you.
Spez, making 9 figures? That is who I am talking about and where the problem lies.
Yes, tax them! Failing to do so is one of the greatest failings of neoliberalism. And of course conservatives have always defaulted to giving corporations everything.
You know, in 1968, just 56 years ago, corporations were paying 52.8% tax rate! This allowed us to invest in our own people and fund so many wonderful programs for growth and prosperity. And these corporations paying over 50% of their profits in taxes were happy to do so! Because it meant they got to do business in the USA.
Now that they aren’t being taxed at even half that rate, what do they do? Buy politicians off for even lower taxes, purchase their own stock to artificially inflate its value, and pay dumbasses like spez 100s of millions of dollars yearly. And if those CEOs fuck up and tank the company? Golden parachute for you - multi-million dollar exit packages and easy access to new boards and leadership positions at other corporations. It’s sick.
All we are asking for is access to affordable healthcare, decent education to better ourselves and level up our skills, and the means to make a decent enough living to afford a roof over our heads and not have to panic about paying for it each month. This shouldn’t be too much to ask in a nation of such incredible excess.
End stage capitalism. The snake is eating its tail.
The reality of his compensation package is a lot more nuanced. The 9 figure number is eye popping, but he’s being paid less than $2 million over 2023-2024, and almost all of the rest is contingent upon a successful IPO and then reaching a set of (incredibly unrealistic) stock valuation benchmarks. Reddit’s stock has to hit something like $45/share for him to see 8 figures and $90/share for him to realize the full amount.
I’m in no way defending this pay package or his shitty behavior, just pointing out that he’s not just getting handed $200 million outright
but he’s being paid less than $2 million over 2023-2024
Read that again. Someone making federal minimum wage would have to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week with no sick days and still wouldn’t make that much in like 130 years, which is well beyond even a generous human lifespan let alone the usable years of a lifespan.
That federal minimum wage is grossly below what is needed just to survive is a different argument, except that it’s people like Steve that are responsible for the disparity between income and subsistence level.
I read it when I wrote it, I’m comparing $2M to $200M here, not to minimum wage, and not defending anyone
That’s the problem though, you’re comparing two ridiculous numbers for one person to make in a year and trying to convince us that one is less bad for some reason. Their both psychotic. And yes, you are in fact defending it as evidenced by you replying to defend it. Come on, man.
$2 million over two years is actually a pretty reasonable salary for the founder and CEO of a major company by comparison to other major companies, and is two orders of magnitude less than $200 million. Two orders of magnitude less than $2 million is $20,000, that’s the scale of difference we’re talking about here
Already hit 45
Don’t forget the rest of your phrase there: justify… “to who”?
If to you, he would have to do a LOT more than he has, for you to still buy in despite seeing that.
To them, merely having the title of “CEO” seems to be enough, to those who refuse to dig deeper. pOsItIoN oF aUtHoRiTaH.
They will be shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED when their money goes poof.
Put another way, your question presupposes several things, e.g. “In a fair world, how could that be allowed to happen!?”.
BTW, Donald Trump lowered the funding for the SEC, the agency responsible for investigation of financial fraud matters. Also he + the Republican Congress lowered the funding for the IRS too. After ACTUALLY “defunding the police” with his right hand - while simultaneously claiming that the leftists wanted to “defund the police” with his left - we will see a lot more of this than we did in the past.
In the past, criminals feared the police and did not want to get caught. Now that there are fewer investigations into financial frauds… we have FA, and we are about to FO.
Entitlement. He got better because he comes from a well to do family and all the privileges that brings. He believes he deserves it, plain and simple.
It’s always been like this. It was tempered for a little while post WW2 (we’re in this together mentality) and then with unions. But that’s all over so there’s nothing stopping skyrocketing ceo wages.
There was a study about this. They gave some people an advantage in a game, like more starter money and more money when passing start in monopoly. Of course they won and if asked why, it was because they were just better than the other players. The same psychology plays out with CEO’s. They had an advantage of rich parents and/or got lucky, but will always say it’s because they are just better than the rest. And that plays out in wider society in a nice circular reasoning.
They are successful because they are better than te rest. They are better because they have money. They have money because they are successful.
It gets lapped up by the ones believing in individual freedom and making your own fortune, because current society, especially in the USA, has been one big experiment in extreme individualism. In practice it mostly turned out to be, partially by design, the old aristocracy under a new veneer.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.
The best thing about his deeply fuckheaded comments is that it’s a perfect example of the sick way the ultra wealthy operate, presented in a way reddit users can absolutely understand.
The act of building early reddit was a group effort. I have no idea how much Spez contributed to the concept, but he did code it – a task that realistically millions of people also would have been able to do.
But a platform without users is nothing. It was the users creating content that truly built reddit and the unpaid moderators who stopped it collapsing under the weight of spam and extremism.
While that was happening, spez shit the bed over and over again. He sold out too early. He openly advocated platforming extremists. He got called out for the bigotry he tolerated in his company. He alienated his most important users so he could sell their content to AI companies.
And now here we are. He makes an absurd amount of money, despite being shit at his job, despite being a clearly bad person and despite his accomplishments being ordinary. Meanwhile, the people he needs, who are critical to his business, are paid nothing.
This is the same setup as Amazon, Walmart, Uber and a million other businesses, distilled down to its very essence.
Billionaires don’t earn their money. Nobody can earn that much because nobody is that valuable. The ultra wealthy only exist, because they stole from the people below them on the ladder. They stole their wages, benefits, pensions, unions, and pocketed the money. If you’re ultra rich, you did it by fucking over the people below you.
And it’s time we fuck them right back.
If we could, we would have already. We can’t really, and he is in a position to be as greedy as he can possibly imagine. $193M is in his pocket right? We all mad but who is gonna take it away? Appeals to decency are cute but a waste of time. He put himself in a position where he can sell things that he didn’t make nor that belong to him and it’s all legal and that’s reality.
Of course we could. We just don’t think it’s worth it because we’re not starving to death at large. We’re in the comfort zone still where it’s better to sit down and be mostly obedient.
oh god the 2nd graders are readin marx agin
he sold out too early
I’m actually kind of interested in this point. Going public for many people is about the growth in the company. No one wants to put money in apple because its stocks are expensive. Its because they forsee it going up.
But i thibk youre right he sold out too early. Peope are willing to invest because of the potential outcome of selling api data to ai companies. People are interested to hear the potential financial increase of api prices making more profit. People may be interested of the potential change of nfts or whatever to drive more money.
But all of that has already happened, hes sold out all those items before the ipo. So i feel like a lot of people are like “what growth left is there?” And infact “is that growth negative going forward as users turn away or are hungry to jump ship if possible”
Who knows though what will happen, maybe im entirely wrong.
He actually sold out early in a much more obvious, objective way.
Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million. Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.
That’s a tiny fraction of his current compensation. He then spent a while backpacking around and started a mediocre company that’s since closed down.
He is neither a shrewd businessman, coding god, nor visionary genius. He’s just some guy that was in the right place at the right time.
The same is true of practically every executive pocketing grotesque compensation, with the only difference being “the right place at the right time” is more often “in a rich woman’s womb” or “at an extremely expensive school”.
He isn’t being paid $200 million a year for his talent. He’s being paid $200 million a year because instead of paying staff better wages, or not enshittifying the site, or paying moderators and content creators, he simply pocketed that money for himself.
It’s what this neoliberal utopia always is. Executives stealing workers wealth and claiming they earned it for stealing so much wealth.
I don’t understand why the mods continue to work. They literally keep the site alive so this guy can take all the credit and all the compensations.
Being able to contribute to a community can feel very rewarding even when you get little to no compensation for it. Many open source contributors know it all too well that their contributions can and will be used by big tech to make even more money.
Plenty of them didn’t, so reddit replaced them with scabs.
Unfortunately, the fact that they understand it doesn’t mean they will do anything about it.
I left and took my data with me. 🤷
Dozens of us out there!
Baker’s Dozens!
You can’t really delete anything from reddit, there’s an archive of everything
Get banned
You can always post the video of my custom chargeport cover. That earned me a couple of bans - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fXJCXQJzj0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=7fXJCXQJzj0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s incredible. I am inspired.
Everything is backed up it doesn’t matter
Massive backups are both costly to maintain and also costly to run in general. I work on an enterprise system with hundreds of machines and we have a whole separate DR environment that does nothing but backups for hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
I am a datacenter admin as well.
Believe me reddit is backing up everything as they always intended to sell everyone’s data.
I Redacted my data and that earned me a few more bans from salty mods.
I’d bet you were subscribed to more than a couple toxic subs then because that didn’t happen to me at all.
That was a very well-crafted and insightful comment, especially that last paragraph.
Similarly, in the midst of historic layoffs in the tech industry, no one blames the CEO for horrible management leading to the over hiring or bad management that led to this. O one blames Zuckerberg for renaming his company and betting an an absurdity that is already being scraped off of PR releases. All because some growth number goes up. It’s insanity.
Employee wages are often the largest expense for a business and they’re always trying to have fewer employees, squeezed harder for more work and less pay.
It really undermines their whole “oh they’re just unskilled labor and drones, they don’t deserve a living wage” rhetoric. If Amazon didn’t need warehouse workers and delivery drivers, they wouldn’t have them. They could be working for $1 a day and they’d still be fired the instant that role was no longer needed.
They get away with it because they just need somebody doing the work and there’s no shortage of desperate, exploited people. Unions and collective bargining definitely help but ultimately the government needs to advocate for workers and simply say things like “If you use slaves at any step in your supply chain, you and everyone you report to is going to jail and your assets will be stripped to cover the pay you owe them”.
It’s such a low fucking bar. Almost every law we have boils down to “don’t be a piece of shit” but we don’t make them for rich people or use them to cover foreign workers.
The mods who stayed after the API desaster are lost.
That seems a little reductive. I’ve never moderated anything, but I bet if I spent years building up a community I would also find it hard to just walk away.
You don’t have to walk away, you can migrate. This is more an issue of building your house on the king’s land. The mods that stayed should serve as a warning to the rest of us that building a Reddit community means that Reddit owns the community you created, and that as a moderator Reddit owns you.
Anyone who’s ever tried to get a friend group to change chat apps knows this isn’t simple.
I imagine doing it with a few thousand people is even more difficult.
Oh geeze, so much. “Hey just grab Signal real quick, it’s super simple and private and SMS seems to get worse as time goes on anyway. Plus I can send you better pictures and videos!”
“Lol meh why you tryin to sell it to me.”
It’s weird, the things people really dig in their heels on. They’ll download apps for the silliest thing but “another chat app” is such an inconvenience.
It’s the only reason I think reddit dot com still resolves at all anymore. If the users weren’t the product, to both the company and other users, better alternatives would be the norm by now.
I don’t see why you need to bring everyone over with you. Even just a hundred is more than enough for a community
I agree. That’s why me and all my friends are on Friendster.
I tried to get my friend group to move to Signal from FB messenger because I did not want that nasty shit on my phone anymore. They were not interested at all and acted like it was the most inconvenient thing in the world. I ended up uninstalling FB messenger anyway and only check it on my desktop and rarely respond now unless it is a one on one conversation or directed at me in a group chat. I told them if they want/need to get in touch with me right away to use old school SMS or actually call me.
This is the truth that it hurts. Then again, they are non techy folks and use what mainstream uses
The assumption here is that mods moving is enough.
The mods didn’t have to move the community, just move themselves and let nature sort things out.
You don’t have to imagine it. The official piracy subreddit did it.
You don’t have to walk away, you can migrate.
We tried that with Lemmy and many great communities only have one or two people posting consistently.
Most people don’t care about behind the scenes
It depends, if mods were fully onboard and had a plan it definitely works. Just look at Piracy or Star Trek communities.
And look at the ttrpg.network community for a counterexample, they still have a pinned post on the dndmemes subreddit advertising Lemmy and ttrpgmemes gets like .1% of the traffic dndmemes does. And this is still after a months-long rebellion complete with allowing NSFW and restricting submissions to a single user account, both things that would normally kill a subreddit dead.
I just checked the Star Trek community on reddit and it’s still up with 753k members and 189 online. The Lemmy versions I can find are a fraction of that.
The idea of Lemmy is great but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking big communities actually migrated.
Depends on what your standard is, to me a community on here having 100+ daily users is already a huge success. I don’t think people expect the whole subreddit to migrate, just enough to have roughly the same amount of content/interaction.
Then its not a migration, which is what we’re talking about.
If you’re happy leaving a group of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in some communities for a group of 100 that’s cool, but don’t spin it as a successful migration.
The rest of the world didn’t even realize we left.
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I think he’s the real reason the punchablefaces subreddit got neutered, because he’s sure got one.
Don’t worry, friends. As a mod of Ten Forward, Star Trek and Lemmy Shitpost, I would never expect a salary.
I do accept bribes.
What would it take for you to see five lights?
Two bars of gold pressed latinum… and not a shilling more!
Side note: I guess that’s an item they can’t replicate, otherwise everyone would have a lot of money all the time.
As long as it is latinum and not just that worthless gold.
I assure you, it’s a high-grade, premium latinum blend!*
*90% gold, 7% soybean oil, 3% latinum.
Armin is a shimmering man.
Well, those certainly are some attractive lobes. 😏
Sorry, those lobes are for business.
Everything has a price.
Do you take your bribes in homemade baked goods?
But they’re all Leola root :(
Neelix likes leola root. It’s everyone else who hates it.
How much for a permaban? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
For you or someone else?
If I win the lottery 10/10 will pay you.
In 2017, there were 74,260 moderators of active subreddits on the site.. We can only assume that number has gone up over time.
If they were to pay each of those moderators $50 a week, or $2600 a year (which is probably generous for the kind of work they’ve already been doing for free), it would almost exactly match the amount of Spez’s pay package ($193 mil). And they actually keep the site RUNNING. Spez is literally just a leech.
This is basically the crux why capitalism is inherently unfair, anti-democratic, and does not distribute wealth based on value in any way shape or form.
This tool is only paid such a figure because he was a member of the founding group, and continued to hold on for 15+ years. He may have been pivotal to their success, or he may have been an idiot that held them back for 15 years. Either way, after the initial x number of years, and y number of employees get involved, whatever value he provided is gradually diluted by the pool of employees. In the case of Reddit this effect is multiplied, as the mods and users have generated 99% of the sites value for the majority of its existence. They could have added zero features for the last decade; just focused on engineering problems to do with scaling, and the site would’ve prospered.
None of this matters to capitalism, as it distributes wealth (value) based on a range of convoluted claims to contracts and ownership, designed to overwhelmingly bias pre-existing capital; people who were born first, the luckiest, whose ancestors were the most cutthroat and ruthless (e.g. monarchs, lords, landowners, the church). It doesn’t have anything to do with actual value to society, or even within a specific business.
as it distributes wealth (value) based on a range of convoluted claims to contracts and ownership, designed to overwhelmingly bias pre-existing capital;
You can just say by power, it distributed wealth based on who holds the most power/leverage.
He feels entitled to their labor for free, simply because he thinks he deserves free labor.
I mean…they fucking volunteered for a free position and could leave at any moment. I hate reddit and I hate this dude but I don’t get why ‘why aren’t you paying the mods’ keeps coming up.
They went out of their way to take a position that they knew they would never be paid for lol
I was a moderator and left.
Agreed. The mods get the status and power they want. Spez is going to get a shit ton of money.
I wouldn’t do it but I have a life outside, many of them don’t.
I was a founding member of glitch in the matrix. stayed for a few years before giving up because yeah…shit sucks and I don’t have the right power boner genes to want to stay at some shit like that but…never in a million years did it cross my mind that I should be getting paid for this shit I went out of my way to do for free lol
If it was a paid position, most the mods would be gone since that couldn’t do as they pleased. The company would be libel for their behavior.
LOL that too. I was banned from…some big rage sub I can’t remember…not actually /r/rage when a mod removed a post about a girl who killed live animals on youtube because she might get ‘harassed’ when the sub was full of shit like that. it was so obvious he did it because she was hot.
There was an entire new post about that drama and I called him a simp. He banned me and called me a pussy ass bitch before muting me so I couldn’t respond.
simp.
Imagine a company running like that. lol That is why I think their IPO will fail quickly. It is just a cesspool of bots, weirdos and very little productive anything.
I never really used reddit much. I always found it to be idiotic extreme on both sides of the table. I am fairly moderate with a few hot-button issues, but I would have a beer with about anyone except Reddit mods.
In reality, he’s entitled to it because they keep giving it to him. Why? I could only guess at their reasons, but it is what it is.
No one is entitled to free labor. We settled this issue 161 years ago.
We settled this issue 161 years ago.
Eh…
During a recent Q&A video, Huffman argued that he was totally justified in paying himself more than the CEOs of Meta, Pinterest and Snap combined.
“If the company does well, I will do well,” he said. “If the company does not do well, I don’t either.”
Motherfucker is saying NOTHING. Generic ass, MEANINGLESS STATEMENT
It’s also a lie. If the company does well, he gets richer. If the company does not do well, he’s still rich.
He’ll still get a golden parachute if the company goes to shit.
I mean, what do you expect him to say? “Lol, get fucked”?
A little bit. He doesn’t strike me as the type to keep the quiet part quiet.
I think what he means is, his compensation is mostly tied to stocks and therefore stock performance.
No, he won’t be poor if it does badly but it would change his compensation in a huge way.
Edit: .2% (rounded up) of his compensation is just normal salary. The rest is stocks.
He gifted himself a ludicrous $193 million compensation package.
Reddit, a 20-year-old company, has yet to turn a profit. In 2023, the platform lost a whopping $90.8 million.
Can someone explain to me how reddit can make a loss, while he pays himself MORE than the loss? Does that not mean that reddit would have made a 113 Million profit before his $193 million compensation package? What kind of business-algebra-gymnastics is at work here?
Does that not mean that reddit would have made a 113 Million profit before his $193 million compensation package?
No. His normal salary is around 300k a year. This $193 million figure was the presumed valuation of a stock/options package he received ahead of the IPO. It doesn’t cost the company anything to pay him in stock, so it doesn’t affect the profit/loss calculation.
Gotta love that monopoly money
Surely it costs $193 million to pay him in stock. That stock would otherwise have been sold for that amount to other people, and he’s getting it for nothing.
Because you’re exchanging stock worth $193 million for an equivalent amount of dollars, there’s technically no profit or loss involved in the transaction. In the same manner, when paying stock as a compensation, you secure services valued at $193 million for an amount of shares worth the same: the transaction is entirely equal. So you don’t make or lose any money by paying in stock.
Of course, the trick is that the value of the CEO’s work for one year can be whatever he says. If your claim is that they could have gotten more value out of the stock had they sold it in the IPO, I think you are absolutely correct in that regard.
The same argument can be had for paying in cash. Yet I still have to pay tax.
In fact I should get money back, because the services I provide to the company outweigh the cost of my wages (otherwise they wouldn’t pay me). I’m making a damn loss over here!
My brain despises econ and I always struggle with it. But that first paragraph smells like “MBAs cooked up a justification for why they don’t pay taxes that doesn’t actually make any sense”.
The second bit makes me wonder “why don’t we have some authority on evaluating the worth of CEOs?”. Insert joke here about that worth being 0. And then I remember that the CEOs are the ones that would have to pay the government to make that rule.
If it doesn’t cost anything to company to pay in stocks, why don’t they give me like 1m $ value of stock? That would make me very happy and it costs nothing to them anyway
I know you’re just being funny, but the idea is that Spez’s shares and resulting influence over a publicly traded Reddit will incentivize investors to buy stock, raising the value of the stock for all shareholders. The problem with this idea is that Spez is an idiot who is actively sabotaging Reddit’s long term viability.
Yes but where is the $300k coming from if they’re losing $90.8m a year? How can they afford to stay in business? Before they went public, who was foolish enough to invest in a company that has never turned a profit? The money doesn’t just come out of thin air. Someone has to be giving it to him.
If I was rich and started a company that lost $90.8m a year, I’d shut down after less than a year before I went broke and homeless. How can a company that never turns a profit make enough money to pay any employee, let alone the CEO?
Before they went public, who was foolish enough to invest in a company that has never turned a profit?
You’d be surprised. The basic strategy of losing money hand over fist for years to grow yourself to as large a user base as possible, before finally aggressively monetizing that user base, is well established in silicon valley. Investors would not even raise an eyebrow at the loss numbers posted by Reddit because of how exceedingly common that is.
And it has worked several times, making some people ridiculously wealthy. Good examples are Amazon, Facebook, and Uber. So usually companies on this level have raised hundreds of millions to sometimes billions of dollars in investment capital, allowing them to operate at these levels of losses for years at a time.
Uber yeah, but the others are probably profitable overall.
So is Uber, since this year. My point is, all of these companies ran hundreds of millions of dollars in the red for years before turning a profit.
Reddit has a lot of users that spend a lot of time there, so it is advertising potential, and a lot of Brands pay for ads on Reddit. Investors hope they will eventually make enough ad revenue to turn a profit.
However Twitter was and is in the same boat, it is a big site with many users, but was never profitable.
It’s a calculation popularized by fintech bro’s in the late oughties.
It’s called pulling an FYGM, a fuck you got mine, colloquially known as a rug pull.
Sure. You’re not an accountant, neither is whoever wrote that, it’s a bunch of bullshit and the IRS made sure they got paid.
At the end of the day, the reddit mods had all the opportunities to once again, protest their working conditions and leave reddit today. But I see no evidence that an organized effort took place.
It’s unfair, and spez isn’t thinking any further than the moment he can sell his comp and move on. But they have all the stakes in this matter and nothing is happening. I know there are efforts on reddit’s part to squelch the moderators, but at some point they have to make clear this isn’t going to work the way it is.
But I see no evidence that an organized effort took place.
Reddit blackout protest clearly made us understand that if we do any sort of resistance against them they don’t think twice replacing the current mods with new ones even if that can affect the subreddit. At this point, they see Reddit as a cash cow and not a people’s forum. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be speaking here in lemmy.
That’s the same problem that workers in Victorian factories faced. We can call them “scabs”, but they’re people who aren’t conscious about their role in an economic scenario or they simply side with the employer out of habit, conditioning or alleged self-interest.
idt they are similar. idt mods should be paid. bringing monetary benefits might be nice but i think it will turn moderating as a means of income. people moderate subreddits out of their passion or that subreddit theme might be their hobby and making it monetary will be a disaster.
but i think it will turn moderating as a means of income
Only if they are paid enough to make it an income.
If they are paid, for example, an annual stipend which reflects their work but isn’t enough to make it a daily job, that would be a huge step in the right direction. You could even make it depend on the size of the subreddit since bigger ones take a lot more work than smaller ones… but never enough to actually live on.
I think a lot of moderators would be very happy to get a couple of thousand dollars a year for their work.
Spez could have swallowed his pride and like gig-economified (If that’s not a word yet, I stake my claim lmao) mods, could have probably gotten away with paying pennies on the dollar with the right scheme (ala Amazon turk). I could see the headlines now “Reddit making waves PAYING moderators”, “Make 500 bajilion Dollars JUST moderating for Reddit!” and people would have flocked to it lolol
The problem is that allowing mod discretion allows for marginalized people to participate in their own communities, and gig economy workers are, at best, only going to remove the most egregious harassment (I used to do something similar for another big social media site, it was an eye opening and horrifying experience - and I didn’t even see the “call the cops” level shit).
I think you’re right that the tech bros would love that move, though.
Tax these mother fuckers. He probably paid next to no tax on that wage. Instead he should have paid 70% in taxes at least
Fine these mother fuckers! We need legislation to limit income disparity between insiders and grunts. It needs to work on total compensation and include contract workers. Any insider making more than 15x the average or median income should have to pay 50% of the difference and that fine should increase every year it’s not corrected.
Federal income tax currently maxes at 37%
Right, it should be >70% for people making this much money. This way the company will put the money into lower paying wages rather than massive single person paydays.
You most definitely pay more taxes than any of these people. They have so many tax loopholes for assets and write offs that they might even get a rebate or credit back. So they might be getting your money as well.
Tim Cook makes 1/3 of that and Apple is worth about 2-300 times what reddit is.
https://appleworld.today/ceo-tim-cook-takes-a-pay-cut-in-apples-latest-fiscal-year/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/global-markets-apple-2023-07-03/
The CEO of the company I work at proudly tells us that his compensation is mostly stock, so if we’re not doing well as a company, he will not get paid.
He thinks this will sound like he’s got skin in the game and is making some kind of sacrifice.
What it actually tells me is that he is aligned to shareholders, not customers or staff. And that he cares about the stock price, which is not at all the same things as whether we are doing well as a company.
I wish I had understood this years ago. I probably would have found a better place to work.
Ehhhhh
Stock price is absolutely tied to the perceived performance and anticipated future performance of the company.
The problem is that most departments of a company are profit centers and therefore there is a huge incentive to squeeze the most return (product features, sales, etc) from that investment (your salary). They will abuse you just hard enough so you don’t quit. Or they will abuse you endlessly because the churn is factored into it.
The company doing well is only loosely tied to morale. Yes happier employees probably perform better but it’s not the best return on the investment.
You’re right that stock price is something.
Companies serve three groups:
- customers
- staff
- shareholders
Stock price measures #3. And one out of three is a pretty shitty overall score.
Before someone tells me that shareholders are everything, and that this is capitalism, I understand your point but if any of 1, 2, or 3 stop participating, the company stops functioning. All three must be served. You just waved aside staff as a bag of feelings, but they literally do everything at the company.
Companies don’t serve staff. Staff is a necessary evil to them.
Yeah yeah. You’re saying that corporate leaders don’t care about people, and we all know that. But the company has to offer staff something to come in and work, right? They get paid right? I’m not saying everyone needs to get desk massages and blow jobs. But there has to be something in it for the staff or there is no company. It sucks to work somewhere that the staff get bare minimum. But the best companies in the world offer a lot more than that, because talent is worth it.
The moderator culture in America and probably abroad relies on unemployed people living in their relatives house who get paid nothing but lame perks here and there. That is the bulk of it.
Some people moderate 5+ chat rooms daily without pay.
They are digital slaves. Make no mistake about it. And they somehow have been conditioned to believe it will pay off when it rarely does.
Spez is a shitbag who never did anything but be in the same room with actual important people.
The mods just have to find a new platform that appreciates them. That’s why I left reddit, I’m giving them free content and a bunch of Spez’s are getting rich off our work.
Then they have the audacity to take away what little we actually had, like the API access. Reddit sucks and the death spiral has begun.
As a final act they will get a bunch of redditors to buy in to their IPO only to see the prices come crashing down while they all hold the bags, and the hedgies get even more of our money. It’s a rigged game we cannot win.
Well we win by not paying into the IPO. If no one buys into it it won’t be worth very much and then they won’t have huge amounts of cash.
They are digital slaves. Make no mistake about it.
… we’re volunteers.
Some people do community clubs as a way to kill time with casual acquaintances. I have severe social anxiety so that’s not a desirable option. Some people do sports. I’m a cripple. Some people do church shit. I hate hymns and I don’t believe in God.
So I moderate. And post.
You both have good points. One interesting aspect is that this volunteer labor is actually contributing to what is making the product valuable in the first place.
You could volunteer to do QA for a software company, or volunteer to clean the floors at a bank, or volunteer to work on an assembly line… And we’d likely criticize those businesses for taking advantage of that labour if it were systemic and widespread.
On the other hand you have open source projects which are freely licensed for huge corporations to make tons of profit from, and all we expect is that they give something back (but we don’t even hold them to that).
It’s interesting to think about where moderation work sits among these.
The reward for the work is the result of the work. For these communities to exists, there must be moderation and for many people the existence of said communities is worth the cost in time/server costs. Reddit selling stock off the backs of people who perform free labor for them is a problem, but someone who sets up a lemmy/mastodon/whatever to host discussion about the things that they care about is not a slave just because they don’t demand monetary compensation or sell your data. The lack of monetization isn’t a bug it’s a feature.
Thank you for your service
o7
Lol slavery
Frankly outrageous comparison
Don’t you dare compare Reddit mods to slaves. Slaves don’t have the option to quit work, mods are doing it by choice.
No, no… slavery, like knitting or moderating a small forum space, is obviously just a hobby, or at worst, a side hustle. It’s just a way to grow your personal brand, not the single worst atrocity across all of human history.
Nobody is forcing them to do it. If they are unhappy about it they should stop doing it. And preferably come to us not getting paid.
They get paid in moderator power trips. “What did you say? Banning…”
I think some of the mods are power tripping, but when I was a mod on one of the subs I think I only ever banned one person. If somebody else had been prepared to motivate the sub then I’d have been happy to let them do it, but it ended up me me doing it.
