And remember, because I feel this always needs to be said with such sums…
193 million isn’t enough for him, and 193 million plus whatever millions he made in years prior isn’t enough for him. He’s going public because he’s a broken, disturbed human being that looks at his unethical levels of wealth, enough for most of the other humans that live here to live 2 dozen extravagant lifetimes, and still demands mooooooaaaaaar.
Why isn’t this widely accepted as severe mental illness?! This is hoarding disorder.
These aren’t big ocean house sums. These are buying politicians sums, and they are only achievable through exploiting other human beings and selfishly pocketing most of the value of their labor because you can get away with it.
Is it possible to set a roof on private wealth? Everything above put into public funds? Give them a “you win at capitalism” trophy and let them into some other game to play.
Yes.
Enforced, adequately high progressive taxation could do that, in fact we had tax rates closer akin to that prior to Reagan, and at one point our highest tax rate was close to 90% as it should be so as to limit accruing enough wealth to warp our society unilaterally beyond their single vote with media and political bribery, but that died a long time ago in the name of “turning the bull loose.”
But then the greediest fucks among us bribed our leaders to get their way, to thunderous applause by idiot conservative peasants and many so called democrats, today’s neoliberals, and here we are, planet burning, terminal stage capitalism, good fucking times. But hey, as long as Bezos can have a second mega yacht to keep his first mega yacht company (he really does look it up) I guess it was all worth our impending collapse.
You know what people did when the highest tax rate was 90%? They made sure they’d still “max out” 25 years from now. They invested in their company reputation and their workers.
I can just picture every modern billionaire vomiting into their mouth at the thought.
Not only would I be willing to give them a trophy, give them a fucking parade, shout-out at the next SOTU, let them sign the original constitution or some shit, whatever the fuck these mentally ill people need to stop destroying society.
Hell keep a leaderboard of who “produced” the most wealth and let them compete with each other. The winner every year gets their name carved in a new " Stanley Cup of Captalism" (the hockey one, not the crazy white lady one). All of that shit would be infinitely cheaper than having billionaires around.
After they introduced reddit gold, they made enough money to finance the service beyond anyone’s lifetime. Now, all that money is gone.
Reddit has been mismanaged, just like almost every silicon valley or venture capitalist driven business. The goal isn’t to make a business profitable, let alone one that is sustainable or serves society, the goal is to meet a certain arbitrary metric that only serves shareholders at the expense of anything and everyone else.
Once you get to that level of wealth it becomes a mentally ill competition game. It’s no longer about the money or what you could or will do with the money, it’s trying to get yourself into higher tiers of even more abhorrent wealth accumulation.
“How did you get here? Business class?”
Laughs the people with private jets
“Where are you staying? A resort?”
Laughs the people with a house in every city
“Where will you go when we end the world? Not my bunker”
Laughs at the people without bunkers
$200M is still big ocean house money. $200B is buying politicians money. The difference is about $200B.
Hell no… Politicians are cheap AF. You could buy a senator to lobby for your bill for $20K.
For $200M, you could buy the entire senate, house, and presidency for a year.
Have we tried crowdfunding that?
Why isn’t this widely accepted as severe mental illness?! This is hoarding disorder.
Doctors don’t diagnose people with “evil”. That’s what priests and philosophers are for. Doctors diagnose people with illnesses and injuries. Things that negatively impact the patient.
This is why I finally left, because the asshole started removing his volunteer moderators and replacing them with employees for the crime of protesting his lies and slander of app developers who brought in hundreds of thousands of users, many of whom are now reading this comment because they’re no longer on that sinking ship of a site.
Fuck spez.
Removed by mod
your username is Fuck spez.
Spez lives in your head rent-free.
you need to do something more productive than bitching on about some idiots who run a website to earn money
Oh my god you’re right, this is all I do. I have no job, no home, no friends, no family, nothing but this account and this app and my anger towards one person I’ve never met. Right.
You spent all this time writing this because his comment is living rent free in your head lmao. At least he is raging against a billionaire, you’re raging against a lemmy comment lmao
That honestly says way more about mods than it does about Reddit. Of course you’re not gonna pay for a task people are lining up to do for free, no matter how much they themselves make.
People do it for free on Lemmy, too. Reddit used to be much more moderator-friendly. I think a lot of remaining mods are just going on muscle memory at this point.
Yes, they do. And while I don’t get it on here either, at least they don’t line the pockets of some shitty company. Some moderation is necessary, and I guess I should be happy about other people doing it for free here.
People do it because they care. I ran /r/StarTrek for over a decade because I wanted a specific type of community to exist that didn’t elsewhere, and reddit made it easy.
Of course, reddit eventually screwed me (and all of us) with their greed and there was no way to move what we’d built. If a nonprofit reddit-like site existed back then I would hopefully have had the foresight to use it instead.
Oh hey, I recognize you. Genuinely and truly, thank you for your years of service. I run a mastodon community these days for the same reasons, and I can only imagine how frustrating and eventually heartbreaking it must have been for long-time reddit mods to slowly get screwed out of the homes they’d built for themselves and others.
🫡
I think I might know part of the reason they aren’t turning a profit…
Numbers like this are always bonkers to me. Like, how have we allowed this to happen?
It’s a fucking social media site. I know surgeons who work 80-100 hour weeks and make 1.5M a year—and even that seems obscene to me. But they’re academic subspecialty surgeons who are quite literally saving lives daily by personally performing heart transplants. How the fuck do we think as a society that a smug ass CEO’s “effort” is worth 200x that?
Society is so backwards and fucked.
Greed should be punishable. If we can punish violence, we should be able to punish greed. They’re two sides of the same coin.
This is a very good argument. Thank you. We have stats/quotes from ultra rich to show this backed up with fact.
Whose fault is it though? I get that collective will is hard, but you as an individual have the power to move, organize, mobilize, whatever you want.
The company doesn’t value you? Move. Why are you giving this company free labor?
For the “prestige” of being a (“anonymous”) reddit mod? Give me a break. There’s better things to do and be prouder of in life.
Stop giving this company time, money, and attention. And tell others to do the same. Otherwise, you’re digging your own (and everyone else’s) hole.
Yes, it’s unfair, but it’s an unfair system. So let’s all do our part. And let’s also organize and mobilize on that. Can’t be done by continuing to feed it.
Absolutely. I quit Facebook about a dozen years ago, Reddit was there to take its’ place.
Then my final visit to Reddit was on June 11th I think it was, the moment the first protest started I quit Apollo for the very last time.
Somewhere around this time, probably earlier, I did the same with Twitter.This time, it was Kbin/Lemmy that were there, the only viable options, still tiny and awkward, the sudden influx still only a fraction of what Reddit has, yet it flooded the system like a bucket of water falling on top of a fly.
And yet here I am, and so are you, and many others. The variety and portions of content are still much smaller than Reddit, but this place has something that Reddit also had: a quality community, apparent from these discussions, or go look at the art in ArtPorn or TrafitionalArt, or sure, absolutely why not - the shitpostings.
This place pushes that intellectual button for me. And now I also give myself time to do the NYT Crossword and watch physics/cosmology videos on YouTube.
I think a lot of them just want whatever community or information hub their sub represents to exist at all, but they know their userbase isn’t actually committed enough to migrate to another site against the grain of network effects.
That network wasn’t built overnight either, though. The same way it was built little by little over time, it can also be dismantled.
I understand the chokehold of network effects. I really do. But what’s the alternative?
Dunno. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that people give spez free labor because he actually has the leverage for it, for now, and the unfairness of that isn’t their highest priority. What I’d like to see is better tools to help users have an easier time using more than one site/network at once, so the prospect of contributing to something other than Reddit is less daunting for typical users. I’m on Reddit, Lemmy, and some other sites, but I don’t really expect most people to be comfortable building a routine of checking a bunch of different sites regularly, or switching entirely to a site without the amount/quality of stuff they want just out of spite or altruism.
Why would anyone buy shares in a company that is not profitable, nor may never be profitable. Even they wrote that in the IPO. What would a buyer of shares be buying a share of?
You live in a world where people are buying NFTs, and you find THIS surprising?
Well, you get the shares “cheap” because it’s not profitable and hope that they turn profitable, e.g. by selling user data, or paywalling everything like Twitter. The mods make $0. For them, it’s probably more like: Why are the mods only paying us $0? How can we maximize that?
Mods are paid in power and the ability to push their opinions. If there are people willing to do it for free then they dont need to pay anyone.
Mods are paid in power and the ability to push their opinions.
A not-insignificant number of them are paid in wages and the ability to push the opinions of their employers. Can’t find it, but there was some well-researched accounts of several of the bigger subs being moderated by think tank / party owned accounts, based on IP-tracking and associated account activity.
Most famously, there was the takeover of the /r/Libertarian server by right-wing agitators back in 2018.
That’s not even getting into the direct (and indirect) advertising that site admins manage on behalf of the company itself, which is functionally a form of moderation.
Most big subs have some kind of professional staff at this point, if for no other reason than inattentive or rebellious moderators have been purged by Reddit admin. You’re not going to find some weekend warrior at the top of /r/pics or /r/news or /r/politics.
I was a mod of a decent sized sub until an admin came in and…somehow…convinced the top mod to make the admin top mod. Left a bad taste in my mouth for sure.
r/Worldnews? More like r/WorldHasbara
Reddit Users:
Reddit moderators sold their souls for garbage and deserve it. The super mods there serve capitalism for free and deserve all the shit that falls from it.
I advocated for forcing state representatives to stand and face a crowd of their voters in r/worldnews and was banned for inciting violence. It’s literally the founding block of American Democracy that our government serves us and should be overthrown when it no longer serves the people, and people were responding positively to the message.
They banned me from the sub and escalated it to the Admins to get me temp site banned.
All because I said representatives should be forced to stand in front of the people they represent regularly.
I hope the CEO continues to grind them till they break.
Why would worldnews host that anyway? It is a US politics concern, which is explicitly outside the topic of worldnews.
And based on my time as a moderator, users who run off to other forums to complain about mod decisions usually leave out important details. Not saying that is necessarily the case for you, but I am not just going to take your word for it.
And violent overthrow is not a “founding block of American Democracy”. Right after he won the Revolutionary War, George Washington used the Army to put down an American revolution against taxes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
This dude sounds loud and incorrect.
I didn’t call to violently overthrow a government, and the irony in the time frame of Washington’s life you decided was important to this conversation.
It is convenient that you only wanted to talk about Washington after the Revolutionary War.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
From the Declaration of Independence itself, the founding principles of the Independence of the USA.
You might not know this, but American state representatives play a part in world politics and there are articles hosted on r/worldnews that are about them.
The comment was not removed for being off topic.
The super mods are getting rich off of this. They have tie ins with capitalists and get paid to manipulate or allow posts.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment here, the world is fucked and unchecked crony capitalism is the problem. The rich get richer and the rest of us barely get by. Also fuck Huffman for ruining the only social media platform I’d used consistently for over a decade.
That said, Huffman’s salary is not even close to the number reported here. He makes something like $350k in a year (still a wildly high salary, no one person needs to make that much in a single year!), this “compensation” is closely tied to his equity in Reddit and it’s predicted value when the company goes public.
Most CEOs are compensated in this way and I think it’s not exactly a bad way to do it (partially for employees but mostly for investors). This value is tied to performance, so if the CEO does stupid shit and ruins the company, it directly affects his compensation. This can be a good thing if that CEO makes good business decisions, which can lead to more jobs and more stability for the workers. I realize this is not always the case, but that’s the general idea.
It still sucks, and I still think no individual should make more money than is needed to live comfortably, but it’s not like he’s raking in 193 million every year like it seems from this tweet.
350k a year sounds about right for an experienced software engineer at a large tech-related company. That being said I don’t think Huffman, as a CEO, even actually does any engineering…
His tech experience is limited to modifying others posts after the fact.
And taking credit for the work of his suicidal friend
They could leave the platform, and watch it crumble and burn.
If I were a mod I’d just mod it poorly. Accept bribes from users to gaslight and ban their enemies. Disable posting restrictions, wait for the spam to come, and just ban a shipload of people in response, then make posting restrictions unreasonably high. Make any mention of the name Goldstein an automatically bannable offence. Change the font to white on white for a day. When users complain, change it to yellow on pink. Shit like that
I think some have been caught getting bribes years ago.
What are they gonna do, fire me from my volunteer job?
Mods? They won’t. Most are either Idealogues pushing an agenda for some reason or introvert shut-ins addicted to the tiny bit of power they have.
We all saw them flake out and fold back in July-August at the mere notion of getting replaced.
I am not even mod, never was, and even I got an email to pre-register for their IPO. For some reason. Deadline to pre-register is March 24th, if I recall.
a lot did when the third-party kill happend. i mean, look at the current state of reddit. almost only bots and karma whores posting, but the real core community who really contributed content (bot just reposting stuff but creating it) is being less and less active.
Always felt dirty on Reddit. Corporate garbage.
Was feeling that more and more and more, the API change being the stray that broke the camels back. Anytime I have to visit that God Forsaken place I want to claw my eyes out. So much dumb, money grabbing shit. From golden up votes, that hideous new logo, that icon screaming “ADVERTISE ON REDDIT”, trying avatar NFTs you could buy (from them of course), stupid store being shoved in your face when looking at profile settings, man fuck that place.
We must all as a nation, stop using Reddit, it’s way too ban happy anyway
I got perma banned there a couple years ago for making someone upset.
Ok, serious question: were the moderators offered share options, or are they hoping that the company would eventually compensate them? Or is this discussion blanketed by an NDA?
No to all 3 questions afaik.
Yes, some of us got this email on Monday.
Pretty sure most old and/or active accounts received this regardless of being mods, though.
No, maybe in some cases, no.
