Reddit CEO Defends His Absurdly High Pay While Not Paying Mods
Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman gifted himself a stunning $193 million compensation package — while mods get nothing.
Fuck spez
Came here for the fuck spez. Was not disappointed.
Fuck spez
Fuck spez
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.
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.
End stage capitalism. The snake is eating its tail.
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.
Already hit 45
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.
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.
I don’t understand why the mods continue to work. They literally keep the site alive so this guy can take all the credit and all the compensations.
Being able to contribute to a community can feel very rewarding even when you get little to no compensation for it. Many open source contributors know it all too well that their contributions can and will be used by big tech to make even more money.
Plenty of them didn't, so reddit replaced them with scabs.
That was a very well-crafted and insightful comment, especially that last paragraph.
Similarly, in the midst of historic layoffs in the tech industry, no one blames the CEO for horrible management leading to the over hiring or bad management that led to this. O one blames Zuckerberg for renaming his company and betting an an absurdity that is already being scraped off of PR releases. All because some growth number goes up. It’s insanity.
Employee wages are often the largest expense for a business and they're always trying to have fewer employees, squeezed harder for more work and less pay.
It really undermines their whole "oh they're just unskilled labor and drones, they don't deserve a living wage" rhetoric. If Amazon didn't need warehouse workers and delivery drivers, they wouldn't have them. They could be working for $1 a day and they'd still be fired the instant that role was no longer needed.
They get away with it because they just need somebody doing the work and there's no shortage of desperate, exploited people. Unions and collective bargining definitely help but ultimately the government needs to advocate for workers and simply say things like "If you use slaves at any step in your supply chain, you and everyone you report to is going to jail and your assets will be stripped to cover the pay you owe them".
It's such a low fucking bar. Almost every law we have boils down to "don't be a piece of shit" but we don't make them for rich people or use them to cover foreign workers.
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.
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.
as it distributes wealth (value) based on a range of convoluted claims to contracts and ownership, designed to overwhelmingly bias pre-existing capital;
You can just say by power, it distributed wealth based on who holds the most power/leverage.
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'll still get a golden parachute if the company goes to shit.
I think what he means is, his compensation is mostly tied to stocks and therefore stock performance.
No, he won’t be poor if it does badly but it would change his compensation in a huge way.
Edit: .2% (rounded up) of his compensation is just normal salary. The rest is stocks.
I mean, what do you expect him to say? "Lol, get fucked"?
A little bit. He doesn't strike me as the type to keep the quiet part quiet.
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.
Gotta love that monopoly money
Yes but where is the $300k coming from if they're losing $90.8m a year? How can they afford to stay in business? Before they went public, who was foolish enough to invest in a company that has never turned a profit? The money doesn't just come out of thin air. Someone has to be giving it to him.
If I was rich and started a company that lost $90.8m a year, I'd shut down after less than a year before I went broke and homeless. How can a company that never turns a profit make enough money to pay any employee, let alone the CEO?
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.
Sure. You're not an accountant, neither is whoever wrote that, it's a bunch of bullshit and the IRS made sure they got paid.
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.
Spez could have swallowed his pride and like gig-economified (If that's not a word yet, I stake my claim lmao) mods, could have probably gotten away with paying pennies on the dollar with the right scheme (ala Amazon turk). I could see the headlines now "Reddit making waves PAYING moderators", "Make 500 bajilion Dollars JUST moderating for Reddit!" and people would have flocked to it lolol
The problem is that allowing mod discretion allows for marginalized people to participate in their own communities, and gig economy workers are, at best, only going to remove the most egregious harassment (I used to do something similar for another big social media site, it was an eye opening and horrifying experience - and I didn't even see the "call the cops" level shit).
I think you're right that the tech bros would love that move, though.
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.
I wish I had understood this years ago. I probably would have found a better place to work.
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:
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.
Tax these mother fuckers. He probably paid next to no tax on that wage. Instead he should have paid 70% in taxes at least
Fine these mother fuckers! We need legislation to limit income disparity between insiders and grunts. It needs to work on total compensation and include contract workers. Any insider making more than 15x the average or median income should have to pay 50% of the difference and that fine should increase every year it's not corrected.
Federal income tax currently maxes at 37%
Right, it should be >70% for people making this much money. This way the company will put the money into lower paying wages rather than massive single person paydays.
You most definitely pay more taxes than any of these people. They have so many tax loopholes for assets and write offs that they might even get a rebate or credit back. So they might be getting your money as well.
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/
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.
You gotta be dumb as fuck to work for free at a profit company
The mods are working 'for their community'. It's just that that's happening on a profit companys platform.
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.
It always amazed me how the literal Nazi accounts could tell me to off myself, that they would kill my family, and other such things, and they somehow don’t violate the TOS.
But me trying to delete my posts is an automatic prime directive rule breaker and my account gets banned.
Holy fuck that happened? That's ridiculous. I'm sorry big shoots.
I wouldn't say all were and, seeing your comments further down, loved your work. Beholdthemasterrace was hilarious. I'm sure it went down for legitimate reasons and not just because "all traffic is meaningful" and the money they generate from nazis spends just as well as everyone else's, so they don't want to upset them......
There are groups of mods who choose to promote themselves above the respectable digital janitor we all know to be necessary to more of a narrative and public opinion curator. Especially on the more news based subs. I don't think they even try to hide it these days.
Re Behold, the subreddit owner Sedorner decided to leave it dark in protest permanently. It's sad. It was so good to mock those pieces of shit out loud. Nazis don't deserve any protection, but Reddit thinks otherwise.
Could you elaborate? There is more than one mod (previously) on Reddit who is infamous for assigning nasty labels like that to all their dissenters indiscriminately. So thanks to their actions, your use of the distinction of a vocal group as Nazis is uselessly ambiguous. What sub of degens?
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.
The mods just have to find a new platform that appreciates them. That's why I left reddit, I'm giving them free content and a bunch of Spez's are getting rich off our work.
Then they have the audacity to take away what little we actually had, like the API access. Reddit sucks and the death spiral has begun.
As a final act they will get a bunch of redditors to buy in to their IPO only to see the prices come crashing down while they all hold the bags, and the hedgies get even more of our money. It's a rigged game we cannot win.
Well we win by not paying into the IPO. If no one buys into it it won't be worth very much and then they won't have huge amounts of cash.
Don't you dare compare Reddit mods to slaves. Slaves don't have the option to quit work, mods are doing it by choice.
No, no... slavery, like knitting or moderating a small forum space, is obviously just a hobby, or at worst, a side hustle. It's just a way to grow your personal brand, not the single worst atrocity across all of human history.
They are digital slaves. Make no mistake about it.
... we're volunteers.
Some people do community clubs as a way to kill time with casual acquaintances. I have severe social anxiety so that's not a desirable option. Some people do sports. I'm a cripple. Some people do church shit. I hate hymns and I don't believe in God.
So I moderate. And post.
You both have good points. One interesting aspect is that this volunteer labor is actually contributing to what is making the product valuable in the first place.
You could volunteer to do QA for a software company, or volunteer to clean the floors at a bank, or volunteer to work on an assembly line... And we'd likely criticize those businesses for taking advantage of that labour if it were systemic and widespread.
On the other hand you have open source projects which are freely licensed for huge corporations to make tons of profit from, and all we expect is that they give something back (but we don't even hold them to that).
It's interesting to think about where moderation work sits among these.
Nobody is forcing them to do it. If they are unhappy about it they should stop doing it. And preferably come to us not getting paid.
Lol slavery
Frankly outrageous comparison
They get paid in moderator power trips. "What did you say? Banning..."
I think some of the mods are power tripping, but when I was a mod on one of the subs I think I only ever banned one person. If somebody else had been prepared to motivate the sub then I'd have been happy to let them do it, but it ended up me me doing it.
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.
They almost certainly "agreed" to terms letting reddit do whatever they want with their posts, and this would likely been seen as reasonable if challenged in court as they were getting a free service in return.
EU and maybe gdpr and other similar regulation matter. The US hasn't updated our regulations on the tech sector, we're like 30y behind.
Will they fuck 🤣🤣
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.
Yeah, any company will take free work.
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.
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.
You realize no one is getting paid on Lemmy right? Yeah maybe someone set up a patreon to cover some of their server costs, but that's probably not even covering the full costs, let alone the time or takes to admin an instance
Mod fatigue because existing mods limit the number of people on the mod team to a size that makes them do too much work?
Eg. If a mod team only wants 5 individuals on the team and the community has 1000000 subscribers, then that's on them.
I'm a believer that the size of a mod team should be proportional to the size of the community; modding should be as casual as submitting a post/comment.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate people putting in effort to try to make life better for everyone, I just think the fatigue is self inflicted.
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.
Why are there minors on that subreddit 🧐 (kidding)
I agree with you, and I think it's a controversial take only in the activist spheres of western online intelligentsia, while frankly most of the world doesn't think it's a real problem in the grand scheme of things
Not controversial in my books. They are choosing to be unpaid mods, don't like it? Don't do it.
Nope, disagree. I don't think mods need to be payroll as full time staff, but I think the lack of compensation is what is contributing to reddit being shit.
Much like YouTube involves people who are willing to make content and drop it on YouTube for free, the truth is that most of the really high quality content would not be there if the creators couldn't monetize their work, and that's because their work costs time and money.
Reddit mods should be entitled to remuneration if the sub generates certain amounts of traffic and content, and then they should be entitled to a set percentage of advertising revenue generated from that sub.
Mods will be better, reddit will be better. Not great, because that asshat spez is still there, but better.
Who the fuck made Tintin CEO of Reddit?
My money is on Thomson. Possibly Thompson.
Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman gifted himself a stunning $193 million compensation package — while mods get nothing.
Reddit CEO: Suck it plebs.
Probably.
Let's hope wallstreetbets crashes and burns the damn hurensohn's "IPO".
Someone tell those Reddit mods they could earn double on Lemmy.
Double of nothing is, let me do the math here, nothing into nothing, carry the nothin'...
That douche can go fuck himself
If the company does well, I will do well
And if the company doesn't do well, he gets to fuck off and retire on more money than ten people can reasonably spend in a lifetime
Spez is such a fuckin tool
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.
Exactly. Reddit mods and Wikipedia admins both get to be kings of their little fiefdoms. The power/pride/whatever is payment enough, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. They are intrinsically motivated.
Being a mod for something you are passionate about is intoxicating. It is an awesome feeling to know you've contributed to the growth of something you care about.
I mean i would do tht same thing if I were in his position. The mods are dumb as shit to do a job for free and the site has been astroturfed for over a decade. Just embrace the bullshit and get paid and laid and sail off into the sunset. Alternatively he's probably going to suck it dry and then sail off.
Christ, what an asshole.
It's fucking hilarious how subs still have pinned "we're open under protest".
But anyway, I think now that his wage is out and soon enough we'll learn about the hundred of millions he has in stock, at least some mods will have had enough and leave.
Capitalism – in it's current form, a system where some exploit others in order to make profit.
FYI Spez is a pedophile piss-boy.
What's the origin of the pedo accusation?
Edit: Is pedophile on the list of words we're gonna make meaningless now?
Pedophile, Racist, Nazi, Fascist, The list grows daily
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Much-hated Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman gifted himself a stunning $193 million compensation package — while unpaid moderators on the platform have yet to see a single dollar, as Variety reports.
During a recent Q&A video posted to the subreddit named after the company's brand new New York stock exchange ticker RDDT, Huffman argued that he was totally justified in paying himself more than the CEOs of Meta, Pinterest and Snap combined.
"When your entire business model is one prick taking nearly everything," one user wrote in a discussion about the IPO on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets last month.
Not long after, Huffman accused moderators — volunteer power users who have historically kept many communities from melting down into a toxic cesspool — of being "landed gentry."
Instead of focusing on its users and the value of self-governance by volunteers, Reddit has agreed to hand over content they've generated to Google to train its AI models, in efforts that are now being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.
One top-voted post claims Reddit's IPO is a "pump and dump" scheme, accusing the company of fraudulently inflating the value of its stock before cashing out.
The original article contains 621 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Fuck Spez. I left Reddit and I’m here now and happier for it.
The Reddit mods and Spez deserve each other. Fuck em, I'm enjoying watching it all burn.
Let me still has mods of course
He will continue unless he ran out of free labour force.
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
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.
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.
It doesn't matter what he says - it's pretty obviously just greed to any outside observer who doesn't think like greedy CEOs do.
I modded r/beholdthemasterrace, which was specifically for making fun of literal Nazi inbreds.
It's too early to see a face and get into a slapping mood.
Get fucked, u_spez
“It’s my money and I want it now!”
Welcome all reddfugees!
Quick, contribute your $34 so he can get a raise next year.
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.
I mean, it wasn't like I was expecting the guy who refused to take down a popular softcore CP sub until it got mainstream media attention to be morally upstanding.
The guy is just trying to cash out as much money out of Reddit as he can until people realize how overvalued the site really is.
