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.
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.
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.
Here's the thing... Money is just a points system after you get into the .1%. A billion dollars, with 5% non-compounding interest (ridiculously conservative) would yield $50 million a year. That's a metric fuckton of money, I can't imagine a luxury (not based on rarity or shaping society) that you could personally enjoy.
So I agree, we should take all their shit, except a single home and personal possessions, and give them a $50 million dollar stipend each year. Let's pin that to the minimum wage and call it absolute rich. Hell, let's let them divide it up between their children... Their family would be set for generations, and any of them could go for the prize to add another one time prize to go even higher. Let's make it fancy as hell, give them a special card or a jeweled broach they can pull out and buy anything without seeing a price... And let's make it not roll over, because we want them to be post-money
Now, the finances work out easily if we let the government invest money (crazy that we don't use that instead of taxes at this point), but the trouble is it's not about money, they need a new game to play. We want to make sure they fuck off and measure dicks with each other in a way that doesn't use our species as the playing board. They want to compete with each other for rank and social status, and we want them occupied
I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, so I'll throw out some ideas. A children's card game, next level Pokemon go battles, a monthly token that can be granted by anyone (with physical proximity) to signify they were helped by an unbillionare, unbillionare exclusive sports (I'd watch), maybe even points for how much of their stipend they don't spend in a year
We can even let them prestige, and see if with a small gift of $5 million dollars they can do it again... By that point I'm guessing their brains have probably rotted, but I'd like to give them the option
Maybe we give them nicer badges that they can whip out based on points, maybe we make a points store where they can use the emergency alert system or rent out monuments for a pizza party... Just things that money can't buy and don't meaningfully hurt the rest of us
Personally, I really love the idea of video game duels and MMA matches (either we laugh or they improve themselves to a point it's actually impressive, win-win. Let's stream it)
Let's bring back the nobility, but in a way that's fun for us and doesn't include ownership of people. Hell, let's add in titles, and let you get in through capitalism, scientific breakthroughs, or social change
I think the absence of cap also makes super rich people motivated to invest in new projects that could make them even richer. If they don't have this motivation anymore, it may reduce this investment source, they'd just keep what they have and don't see the point in doing more with their money. Would the state do that better from taxes money? Maybe
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
There's a yacht, and then there's a yacht.
And he's accomplished so hilariously little compared to the other billionaires out there. Not that they deserve billions either, but look at Google and the ridiculous progress they've made, and innovations they've created, and code they've open sourced. Steve wants to be among such "peers" in terms of wealth while having done relatively nothing.
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.
Reddit is fun user here, exactly. I left the moment I read about the API bullshit.
Yup, same. RIF app was how I loved browsing reddit, and it shutting down over the API cost was devastating. Add in the forced removal of mods who didn't re-open their communities that were protesting was the final nail in the coffin for me. Fuck their IPO.
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
Him living rent free in his head is living rent free in your head broski. fuck that, you should pay him rent for his living rent free experience living in your head
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.
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?
Sure there are some mods on reddit who are doing it for their community.
Let's be real though... the vast majority of mods in any online community are fief lords. They do it because having power over other people feels good.
And their content creators are also paid nothing.
But their content is now valued and being sold at a contract of $60 million a year
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Reddit Users:
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?
Look at it from the other side.
They were there when their subreddit was starting very, very small. Over time, with great effort and as a labor of love, their community grew to numbers they never dared to imagine possible, a successful buzzing community that gave them great frustrations and thrills, anxiety and joy. In a very real sense, this is their baby, they have been through thick and thin together. To hand this over to some indifferent, greedy and abusive asshole... the thought is too much to bear.
These people are suffering. They have a sense of belonging to a community that is being held hostage. To accept they were tricked and are being exploited is a horrifying thing to do.
For 193 million I would also let people write 'fuck u jeena' for two months.
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.
what is that supposed to mean? when the api charges were announced, multiple subs went private and were resurrected against the mods' free will. other mods were instituted. whether any of those made any money, i don't know. keep in mind that i was not one of those mods and thus cannot verify that information, it is just what was posted on reddit multiple times. trying to deescalate and moderate a sub is a good thing and we should be grateful to those who actively do, but holding it against them that they do not take any money for that neither makes sense nor does anyone benefit from it.
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 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.
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.
They could leave the platform, and watch it crumble and burn.
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.
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
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.
I'm going to replace could with will in my head so I can sleep really well tonght
Workers of the Internet! ...... moderate some more!
Always felt dirty on Reddit. Corporate garbage.
Wasn't always like that imo. More of a slow descent that turned into a speedy drop off last year.
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.
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.
I'm definitely going to short this stock
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.
No wonder they're such assholes.
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.
Are you saying he's doing an excellent job on maximizing output?
But reddit hasn't been profitable, right?
The moderators who run much of the site are not paid directly, but they're definitely in league.
Powermods took over reddit a long time ago. Hell, I'd go so far as to say reddit secretly promoted r/the_donald and other extremist subreddits, and had a direct hand in getting him elected.
they’re definitely in league.
They're really not. I got to interact with many of them during the vaxxhappened protest and I got the impression that they were largely rather timid people. I do think that Reddit management is happy with the arrangement though, because it means they can abuse the mods knowing they won't rock the boat.
The situation around the Donald is probably true, but the most telling thing is when they replaced the top KotakuInAction moderator in order to keep the subreddit not-private.
*ran
Mods are paid in their ability to power trip
Has this been posted on Reddit itself anywhere. I'd be interested to read users comments
Lots of people calling out mods as suckers yet as a user of the site they're contributing to this shit show.
I appreciate this sentiment, but I would not advise paying moderators straight out.
Yeah, need to tax the shit out of them and make the profits a social benefit. Fuck the rich. Eat the rich.
I think he is seriously devaluing someone giving those mods Reddit Gold
Jannies are gonna janny. When resetera was sold off and the jannies still decided to work for free you know that they get paid in power. Same with the reddit jannies and the api fiasco last summer.
Moderators get a feeling of power. I've never heard a reddit mod say they want money.
So what, give the CEO half and pay the rest to the mods? Like 1300 bucks per year without tax and fees. What would be left? 50 bucks per month? Reddit has like 75000 moderators. Some for huge Subreddits, some for small ones. Equal pay? Or what?
Someone has to organize all that paying, many are in different countries, different tax laws. In the end, there would be like 20 bucks per month for each. You then would also require extra heavy checks for moderation quality to ensure they are worth their pay. You'd need systems to prevent abuse. If there's money involved, people become extra greedy. Just pay some of them? Only the ones working a few hours per day? Pay per moderating action? What?
Or you just do double pay for the CEO. Seems like a no-brainer.
"paying people who create value for your company is too complicated to worry about" is a weird justification
It is a no brainier in the complete opposite direction you proposed
…or you invest the money in actually making your platform decent and adding features mods have been asking for years. But then big number doesn’t go up so it’s a bad idea I guess.
I guess I would also answer that with controversial opinion.
They don't want a better platform. Reddit does exactly what they want it to do. To generate tons of discussions about the same things, over and over again. To generate loads of different feelings and situations. To create a very diverse pool of data.
They might have started out with a good ideology, but then success came.
I like to compare it with Quora. It could have been the best site of its kind. But it served its purpose, being a feed-bucket for an AI, and now it's not even moderated anymore. And they did pay their users and mods, but it didn't work out, too many tiny transactions, only like a handful of people got anything, and those abused it like crazy.
Just my take on it. Such payment models won't work. A few giants will earn the majority, and they will cheat and fight for it, the rest will still get nothing. They could have taken three thirds of that CEO money to create a few resident jobs. But why bother, Reddit is exactly how they want it to be. Most users just don't realize the pseudo-scam, believing it's their favorite discussion platform that they can influence, while the creators have a content-generator with free labor in mind.
Clean up my comments, chat Janitors! - some guy who made me lmao on a pretty good mobile games chat
They're paid with the joy of being powertripping censoring assholes
You have been reported.
I am not a bot. I am a Volunteer Reddit moderator. I do not have mod powers but my reports are taken seriously and those who get on my bad side tend to get banned in under 24 hours. I have numerous rules, which you may read in my post history, but 1 is the most important rule of all
• I am an officer in training, and I expect to be treated the same way I would be with my uniform and badge.
Watch your back and get used to this face kiddo, you’ll be seeing a lot of it.
