- 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.
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
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 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.
I agree. That’s why me and all my friends are on Friendster.
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.
This is the truth that it hurts. Then again, they are non techy folks and use what mainstream uses
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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Nice detail
Ha! F Spez.
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I can still see original comment?
Both that one, and the one you’re replying to have been deleted.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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/
Millions of dollars of pay are always absurd but this really puts it into perspective
I always gear that money vorrupts everyone at some point, and i really wonder if that is true. Like i couldn’t imagine making a few million dollars a year and don’t say fuck it after a year to never be seen again
Same. I’d take my $30 million or whatever it was after the first year, quit, buy a modest house, put the rest into savings, and live off the interest. And you can live really well off the interest of $30 million.
It kinda does feel like spez is just testing how much he can squeeze out of the leftover marks at reddit before leaving the carcass out to dry.
Yeah. You’d have to be an idiot to work for that guy for free at this point, unfortunately.
If only there were an alternative platform to Reddit that we could use instead.
It is not really an alternative. So many people here complaining about quality, and the constant desire for this not to become the new Reddit.
But that’s exactly what it needs to become. A place where mindless users can post the same silly crap every day, without getting shit for it. And without being rattled by entitled mods that feel they should be compensated for doing what they want to do.
Let communities talk and mods just be mods, not critics.
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It took a really long time for Reddit to reach a point to where it was decent and attracting new communities. I am hoping all the niche little places move over to Lemmy, or at least off Reddit.
If there is a niche community you miss, you could start it over here. I have no idea how to go about doing it, but it might be worth it for you. Start making this the better place.
The problem is defederation. It basically breaks the entire concept of the “fediverse” and will prevent critical mass. Each instance becomes a little fiefdom. There should instead be the ablility to create and share extremely configurable filters (ala ad block lists). People can say and do whatever whilst simultaneously choosing what they do and don’t want to see at the individual level. The benefit is everyone sees what they want while also not losing access to any communities simply due to an egotripping instance provider. Kind of like an urbit model that isn’t so esoteric and weird.
This and the duplication of communities and also the fact that my account is not just a generic, across the verse account, but specific to an instance that can shut down or disaaper and remove all my preferences and post history.
These things were what was confusing when I joined and what I still think are the biggest issues with this platform. The fact that I hypothetically look up reddit alternative, find Lemmy, join the first one that shows up in the results without knowing any better, look up communities and there’s like 5 of the same ones or none because it’s defederated from others, the instance blocks NSFW communities because they are prudes, is blocked by others for various reasons, and then they could shutdown a week later removing my account is just insane user experience tbh.
I was wondering why there was no NSFW communities.
So none of the places on the Lemmy I have joined are part of the larger Lemmiverse? Or only some of it is?
You can check blocked stuff here https://sopuli.xyz/instances. Your instance is not blocking NSFW so most probably you need to check your account settings. There is a “show NSFW” checkmark in there.
I didn’t know this, thank you for explaining.
Perhaps instead of pissing and moaning you could actually post something in a community here to start the process of growing new forums.
I was early to Reddit. I think my account was created around 2007. I can assure you that it was similar to Lemmy now. Building a community takes time.
The comic book strips on Lemmy seem to be depressing.
Possibly because many users coming to Lemmy are pissed off by something. It’s not a platform for fun users, but for grumpy old cats wanting their unachievable utopian discussion forum, where all behave the same as they do. ;)
Criticise lemmy and prepare for downvotes deluxe.
