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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He feels entitled to their labor for free, simply because he thinks he deserves free labor.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Tax these mother fuckers. He probably paid next to no tax on that wage. Instead he should have paid 70% in taxes at least
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
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.
How are mods landed gentry? I spent my time as a Reddit mod with Nazis trying to dox me and threaten me, before Reddit banned me for making fun of Nazis.
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.
Hopefully EU and US regulators will stomp that site to the ground as selling user generated data for AI companies sounds like something most people on Reddit did not sign in to.
Since he took back over, Spez has been making reddit an objectively worse experience. Doesn’t deserve that pay.
Nobody's making them be mods. I'm not pro reddit at all, but a tool is a tool, do what you want with it.
Mods should stop working as mods. But they don't. 193 million maybe sounds fair for a person able to convince people to volunteer to free, and not quit despite this being obvious.
I've said it before and I'll say it again (not on Reddit): Fuck Spez.
Controversial take, I don't think mods need to be paid. You don't have to be a mod, you're actively choosing to be a moderator. If you aren't getting paid for your work and dislike that, then don't do it. There's always going to be someone willing to do it for free, like a hobby.
I agree in principle, but its a really bad thing to encourage people to dedicate free time to a thankless job because the only people who will endure it are those with agendas, power trippers, sociopaths, or anyone else bored. In my own experiences and talking to others, mod fatigue takes over after some time.
Community websites are really bears the bigger they get.
In reality, reddit should have its own moderators on the payroll with its own moderation policy. They did this once before, but the person was of questionable background. Instead of trying to fix the policy, reddit just went back to the unpaid landed gentry.
Mods getting paid for their work does not fix the problems they have being unpaid as-is. That requires strict moderator policies, moderation logs, a proper appeal/arbitration process, and even then its not going to be 100% fair. There's not a whole lot reddit can do at this point even if they went back to paid mods. Which they won't, because they're now in the tail end of the company's lifecycle: Gut everything so the founders can exit, leave the suckers with their shit product.
I also agree. But for a for-profit company like Reddit, there should be a threshold for certain subreddits that require mods to be paid.
That is, for a major/popular subreddit like pics the mods should be paid by Reddit.
For a minor subreddit like r/hotgirls whowanttohavesexwithgcanuck the mods can be unpaid.
Let's hope wallstreetbets crashes and burns the damn hurensohn's "IPO".
Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman gifted himself a stunning $193 million compensation package — while mods get nothing.
Reddit CEO: Suck it plebs.
Probably.
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