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Remember when Spez said it was “It’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company”? Apparently, that means paying himself $193 million and single-handedly tanking Reddit’s profitability right b…::undefined
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The truth is he’s a jealous little turd of a person. The other reddit founders, the ones with brains and skills, got out early and got paid. Even the dead one was more successful. He wants to drain reddit of money while tanking it. He thinks he’s entitled. It’s a real shame he reproduced too, the poor kid is doomed with a godawful role model like that.
Ohanion was also a fucking prick, shitting up the company while he was there. All the Ellen Pao stuff and the r/IAMA clusterfuck that led to the first big Reddit shutdown? Yeah that was all Ohanion’s doing. Then he let Pao take all the heat for his decisions and get ousted.
There was only one worth a damn.
He was too good for this world, and we are all lesser for his absence.
The myth of Aaron Swartz continues…
He was a big proponent of free speech absolutism. He’d have been more than happy with the jailbait subs, watchpeopledie, fatpeoplehate etc. I really don’t think he deserves a free pass just because Reddit wasn’t enshittifying while he was around, as it was in a growth phase. It had other problems which needed resolution.
WPD has it’s place and there was nowhere on the internet that was nearly as sanitized as it was on reddit compared to other gore sites.
That morbid curiosity in my twenties helped me through a lot.
I guess it’s the one I care least about that I listed. Substitute in the overtly racist subreddits, if you wish, as they surely didn’t deserve a platform.
You have to admit that comparatively he was the least rotten apple in that basket though.
What more can you say about a man who lets cats with silicone implants have sex with him?
I’ve never seen that combination of words before and I never want to see it again.
Uhh what
Well, that’s enough Internet for today!
Give us the source for the implants cats, pilgrim
Adult companies enshittify.
BOTS, BOTS, BOTS, BOTS, BOTS,
BOTS, BOTS, BOTS, BOTS, BOTS,
BOTS, BOTS, BOTS, BOTS, BOTS,
BOTS,
#EVERYBODY!
Beets, beets, beets, beats!
The really titillating question is what happens when reddit collapses as a trustable source of information and google search is then totally useless.
It turns out social networks aren’t great businesses unless you heavily exploit the people maintaining those communities.
The trust is already gone.
People end up doing what they have always done, and go elsewhere.
They went to Reddit to begin with, and they can just as readily leave it.
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He meant that Reddit should start behaving more like an ‘adult entertainment’ company, so basically everyone that provides content for it is getting fucked.
How much of that compensation is in stock? It’s pretty common for executives to be largely compensated in stock, particularly right before an IPO.
I only point this out because the math isn’t necessarily as simple as revenue minus executive compensation. Issuing stock isn’t a cash transaction for reddit.
His pay was $300k something. So it was almost all stock. To convert his ownership stake into shares ahead of the IPO as you mentioned.
He supposedly owns around 3-4% of Reddit. And they’re trying to IPO at an initial valuation of $5B. So when that goes to shit like it probably will this theoretical $192M drops dramatically.
Unless he pumps and dumps them, selling them after the IPO
Selling off shares from insiders is a publicly announced process that involves coordination with the SEC in advance, so “pump and dump” doesn’t really apply here. That terminology usually applies to penny stocks that are traded on minor exchanges, where a price increase of mere pennies could represent a very high percentage increase, making manipulating the stock price through fraudulent claims potentially very profitable for the manipulators.
He could sell shares early but that news would also probably very negatively affect the value of the shares he’s selling. Not really great when the CEO is not confident of the long term value of his own company’s stock.
You can’t do that, lol.
Not to defend Huffman, who’s a huge asshole, but…
He wasn’t really oaid 193 million. That’s the value (on paper) if the stocks and options he received. His actual salary eas 341,000$.
“he wasn’t actually paid in money. it was just the value of the gold bullion he received”.
Is that better somehow? I never understood this logic. Money itself is existentially just paper with no value until you spend it on something, and its value also rises and falls based on other factors. It’s basically stock in the US economy.
Why is it not okay to give someone one kind of paper but not another?
Are you asking why stock of a single company is different from “stock” of the richest country and only superpower on earth?
Also, money is liquid, can be spent immediately. Stock is not liquid, it has to be traded, vested, etc. and given enough stock will tank yje value if too much of it is liquified at once.
Because those stock grants are conditional on a lot of things. It’s not money yet, it’s potential money if certain things happen. Yes, those things are likely easily achievable - they either unlock over time, or on the IPO, as long as he is still with the company. But until they vest, they don’t fully exist yet.
FWIW, when they do vest the IRS will consider the value of the stock on that day as income. They don’t mess around with that shit. Even if he decides to hold the shares, he will still need to pay taxes on them based on their value on the day of vesting, but not before. He has people to advise him on what is best to increase his treasure horde, though.
That much stock is not easy to sell, he’d tank the value of the entire company and never retain anywhere near 193M. You could sell that much gold.
Money is not wealth. That’s a very big difference.
Separating these things is how the rich avoid paying taxes.
Stocks and options that he’s about to unload in the open market, assuming they will be vested. I think that’s the real reason why they are opening up the IPO to Redditors. They want a fair amount of the stock - but not too much! - sold to people with an emotional attachment to it, who won’t get in the way of their selling.
Note the Trump people playing the same exact game with DWAC.
He can’t unload all his stock for $193m.
I don’t like the idea of calling it a non-payment when receiving compensation in the form of valuable assets in addition to money.
Receiving stocks or gold bricks or houses or blow jobs, or anything else of value, is payment, and should be taxed as such.
For the record it absolutely is taxed as such. As soon as it vests the IRS considers it income, whether they sell it for the cash or not.
Its a huge headache for startups sometimes. I had team members I wanted to compensate but just giving them the equity would have been an imediate big tax bill on a non-liquid, and speculative, asset. There’s ways to massage it (like vesting) but he will absolutely have that taxed.
Oh, and I could be wrong but I think the share value is just taxed as ordinary income, not capital gains. Ie: if the award is denominated in $1 shares, which he sells for $1.10, the $0.10 gets capital gain rates (if he held it for a year) but the $1 is taxed just like a paycheck.
I think he is fully expecting the 193 Million to tank as soon as it goes public. Hence why he paid himself so much. The value right now is whatever they say it is.
There is just no reason why Reddit’s CEO was making almost 200 million dollars other than short-sighted greed. They weren’t even paying him stock options: just straight cash out of the coffers.
I see he went to the Adam Neuman school of business…
Probably very unpopular thoughts but…
A) How many of us wouldn’t angle for an almost 200 million dollar payout? Seriously? All of us are too good for that?
B) Social media like reddit is basically free for users and costs way more than most of us could afford to run. We probably need to figure out some middle ground where people expect to pay a few pennies for something they use for hours a day. Unfortunately, advertising etc has conditioned/conned people into thinking everything should be “free” and with ads.
Most people wouldn’t even know what to do with that kind of money, I doubt spez even has use for it all, its just big number goes up.
He should give it back to society and have a humble income, everyone should do this.
As to “B:” we have Lemmy, run by enthusiasm and donations. Maybe one day we will get media like video to an even smaller size and have a federated YouTube style site.
AV1 could actually be huge for PeerTube, now that I think about it
It’s not free. Moderators spend their time keeping things sensible and users spend their time creating content, by posting, commenting and voting. Millions of people contribute tiny amounts, giving the community great value. They’re the reason the site has any value at all. In comparison, the operating costs, and whatever work the company execs perform, are small compared to the not-at-all free work people in aggregate put into the community.
These are sites premised on free labour but the end user pays nothing to enjoy the site.
As much value is created by those volunteers, the operating/dev costs are very real and can’t just be hand waved away.
And you’re claiming that people can’t expect to use it for free, because they need to pay those costs, which is nonsense. If they have enough to pay a CEO $300k in cash each year in addition to stock options, they are making plenty to cover their operating costs. Thus there’s no reason users, who are already brining value to the platform, should pay more in addition to the value they bring. Asking for people to contribute for free and then pay to access what they’ve built is a crazy business strategy that’s bound to fail.
This might help you understand the issue with reddit, which apparently has yet to ever cover its operating costs within a year:
Kind of eye opening, even if you vaguely understood the situation beforehand.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point.
You can still use reddit for free, that won’t change. That is because to reddit you are cattle, the product, what is being sold.
And as long as you are a product, reddit is going to extract as much value from you as they can. It’s why their valuation is in the billions, you are lucrative cattle. And qs someone who has wrangled that cattle, spez is taking his cut.
