this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 266 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (14 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I can just picture every modern billionaire vomiting into their mouth at the thought.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

The 1950s had a great thing going. Once you hit $100,000 in a year, anything beyond that was taxed at about 90%. Nobody wanted to give the government 90% of what they'd be making, so no one did, and the 1950's were absolutely booming for the US middle and lower class. You could afford a new house, car, and two kids at a job you didn't need a college diploma for (or often even a highschool diploma) on a single income household.

Without having to pay ridiculous sums of money to the ceo's and executives and whatnot, companies were just left with the option of using the funds to invest back into their companies and their employees instead going after pocketing as much money as quickly as possible.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

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[–] [email protected] 127 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Reddit is fun user here, exactly. I left the moment I read about the API bullshit.

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Those mods volunteered for the community, not for the company and certainly not for spez. However by turning reddit into a profit machine, spez is exploiting the volunteer work they did, and in the process, destroying it. reddit as an IT product is worthless, the communities are the value.

Take Open Streetmap. It's been built by the community for the community. So many contributors who volunteer. Imagine it was a proprietary product and one day they start charging for it. Is that not theft from the people who actually built OSM for free?

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think I might know part of the reason they aren't turning a profit...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This was my take away. They paid 1 individual over twice the amount they lost last year. That fix is easy math to me.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And their content creators are also paid nothing.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

But their content is now valued and being sold at a contract of $60 million a year

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I used to moderate an older forum site 2 decades ago, (the place is still up and running) they asked me to sign an NDA after realizing I never signed one.

Which seemed reasonable, until I realized, I was an unpaid employee, working in my free time. So, immediately quit and suddenly faced backlash from my fellow moderators in front of users.

Suffice to say, all mods had alt accounts that they used to psychologically torture other board members. This site was owned my a major television broadcaster. My point is, don’t ever work a job someone should be getting paid for.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago

The disconnection between the crowd-sourced content (original stuff and commercial articles) and Reddit’s heavy handed dismissal of users always felt weird.

The fact that they (with user help) aggregated OTHER BUSINESS’ content without recompense was a mystery. Like, you didn’t even need to go to the other site to read it.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago

The mods might actually spend money to run bots and other moderation tools on their own servers. Might even pay reddit for api usage too for using those tools.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Maybe in 2022. 2023 had 25% of the VC deal volume that 2022 did and 2024 ain’t looking any better.

The age of cheap capital has finished. Unless you’re already healthy or can demonstrate a reasonable path to profitability, later-stage VC is actually really hard to find right now. Angel capital still abounds for people with good track record.

But it’s a tough environment for Reddit to do an IPO in and they probably know it. But they have no other option - they can’t continue into series H, J, Z. Those days are gone.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

You live in a world where people are buying NFTs, and you find THIS surprising?

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago

For 193 million I would also let people write 'fuck u jeena' for two months.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Such a scam website - all the content is provided and moderated for free, the CEO steals anything resembling profit, the investors are all left with empty pockets. Fuck spez and anyone still using that site.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

Reddit Users: this-is-fine

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Is it really a secret that Spez was getting paid a ton and the mods were working for free? I mean CEOs always get paid way too much, or else they wouldnt bother taking the CEO position.

Also, Im pretty sure all those reddit moderators were doing it for the feeling of power. I mean, why else would you have career mods running hundreds of subreddits while power tripping over everyone all the time?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Senior management people making 200k a year for all the work have to be the most cucked people on the planet. It is pathetic that we let every org get taken over by people less useful than a sponge, and we pay them hundreds of millions for the privelege. Even so called mutuals and co-operatives which are in theory owned by their own members still succumb to this embarassing plague. I don't know who among these losers first decides on behalf of everyone else we need to get a daddy dom and become pay pigs.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Iirc some moderators are actually paid, not by reddit though. Like Indie Stone, the maker of Project Zomboid, pay for moderation team on reddit. But that's just a drop in the ocean.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

critical support to reddit for making reddit mods' lives worse

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

No wonder they're such assholes.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

But “Reddit’s never been profitable” lol

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (6 children)

They could leave the platform, and watch it crumble and burn.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Workers of the Internet! ...... moderate some more!

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