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.
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.
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
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.
I was a moderator and left.
Why does he need to?
He’s made thousands of people work for him for free and contribute data for him to sell for free. By most business definitions he’s a legend that all other ceos wish they could copy.
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.
How much for a permaban? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
For you or someone else?
If I win the lottery 10/10 will pay you.
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.
Short and distort boys
Yeah, the mods are the landed gentry
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.
Why would he pay people who are stupid enough to work for free? To that point, why would anyone work for free? It’s not as if they’re being forced to.
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
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.
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.
End stage capitalism. The snake is eating its tail.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.
While I don’t want to support reddit or turbo capitalism, I think a viewpoint that is often missed here is the fact, that a fair share of those subreddits are created and moderated by people that create and hold together communities, especially in the beginning of the sub. There are also a lot of cases were the platform is used to cross link to other platforms and gain profits there.
The problem were the mods who didn’t know any better. Spez hid his intentions very well, and made all the mods look like fools working for free
Spez hid his intentions very well
He did?
Yes he did. People are associating what happened with the short term, ie the last couple of months, but spez has this planned for years when we were all in the dark
Its been obvious for weeks with the slow drip of news, the mods were getting the shaft and nothing was done about it (to my knowledge).
Either they really fear the sobriety from their little bit of authority, there’s a movement that’s going on in a Discord in a back alley and nobody’s said anything, or these people really are rubes, fucking buffoons, absolute morons.
And I doubt the last point because I saw firsthand how Reddit admins quickly turned the argument against the protesting “power-tripping” mods during the API revolt with blatant astroturfing. I saw it. I know it happened, you can’t tell me otherwise.
In the end it was a subset of users that basically told mods “you’re just janitors, we don’t need you, anyone can do your job” followed by a partial exodus and… a major drop in quality on all but the larger subs.
Welcome all reddfugees!
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.
Came here for the fuck spez. Was not disappointed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you use the
site:reddit.comoperator, you might get better luck, since it automatically excluded 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.
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.
Fuck spez
Someone tell those Reddit mods could earn double on Lemmy.
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.
Lemmy has no users and the content is shitty memes and lame cartoon panels. It’s got no niche communities, which is what made Reddit good.
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.
Perhaps instead of pissing and moaning you could actually post something in a community here to start the process of growing new forums.
The comic book strips on Lemmy seem to be depressing.
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 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.
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.
I wish I had understood this years ago. I probably would have found a better place to work.
How much does he make? I don’t want to open the article
$193m according to the blurb.
