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.
The funny thing is that Spez didn’t even come up with the idea of Reddit. Him and Ohanian showed up with some other dumb idea and Paul Graham was like, that’s stupid, try this idea of mine.
Then Spez put together some shitty code in Lisp of all languages, which Aaron Schwartz had to rewrite in Python. The site was so unstable that Spez slept with his laptop so he could reboot it in the middle of the night.
They used sock puppets because nobody was posting enough content. Then they cashed out and fucked off, leaving Aaron to rewrite it, and Erik Martin to actually make a proper community out of it.
Then Spez comes riding back into town over a decade later to claim credit while he fucks the whole site up by selling out.
Truly a masterclass in incompetent white male privilege.
white male
Kind of a weird flex when they're all white males.
It’s hip to be racist against white people, did you forget? /s
But he is The Whitest..
sound of washing machine detergent race
See, I was about to agree with your comment but then you had to go and fuck it up with your last sentence. What does the color of his skin have to do with him being a jerk?
I miss Aaron Swartz. Spez is so greedy and incompetent.
Also many of the mods on default subs, not all, are literal teenagers lacking a modicum of reason or maturity I swear. Not the brightest bulbs.
On the teenage mod thing, I have a bit of insight-
So basically modding on Reddit sucks. You feel like you have zero support for a volunteer position and it genuinely becomes taxing. I moderated a large subreddit (4 mill+ subs) for a few years alongside 2 smaller (still 100k+) ones. Both of these were exhausting and I ended up letting auto mod do half the work.
I got invited by a friend to moderate a default subreddit. I lasted less than a week. The types of things people post on there that the users never see is horrifying and whenever I can afford therapy it will be getting brought up. I'm talking early 2000s gore sites level shit in addition to the buckets of CSAM.
I started moderating one of the smaller communities back in high school. Let me tell you, my time was worthless back then and I was on top of everything. Once college started, that slowed down a lot and setting up auto mod for the common stuff became entirely necessary. Once I graduated, I suddenly had zero want to moderate. I barely touched anything and automated 99% of my tasks.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that moderating defaults is damn near a full time job, and most of us adults just don't want to do it. I know I sure as hell didn't.
And let me tell you, some of the mods on there get just an awful break. Almost all of them are just people trying to build communities, many of whom have no idea how, especially once they get big. The real people to watch out for are the mods no one knows the name of. I know for a fact that many power mods were completely unknown. They used dozens of sock puppets to moderate hundreds of communities, all of them aggregated in private discords. I managed to find a wild invite to one once, but I got booted before I could start taking screenshots
Really not meaning to call out anybody, I haven't encountered this much here on lemmy, but you often find those sort of attitudes with unpaid "jobs" online. Mods everywhere, wiki editors (incredibly territorial and clique-ish), etc.
There has to be the right mixture of passion, desire for control, and most importantly the free time to put into it. Also have to toss in the strong belief in your own idea of how the space you oversee should be. The free time part often leads to people without much better to do with their time/lives taking up the reins.
If the team is able to develop tools to reduce the time expenditure, or the userbase is small enough that things don't tend to get overwhelming (almost all of lemmy), you don't see it. But yeah, the big reddit subs, especially now with the third party API ban killing the overwhelming amount of available mod tools... it's a real tempest in a teacup over there.
Again, most lemmy mods are great, with only a few notable exceptions. Thankfully it's astoundingly easy to block users and communites on the fediverse, and usually you can find the same community topic on another instance and not miss out on much. Love this place.
Wow, this is really how it happened?!? Unbelievable. Well done Spez, all your creativity shines every day...
Yep, and all gleaned from publicly available interviews.
Take it with a grain of salt, there are lots of pure falsehoods stated there. For example, Spez's first stint in Reddit lasted two years longer than Swartz was involved (2007 for Swartz, 2009 for Spez).
I like this article. Starts off good with "much hated Reddit CEO"
I've loved the coverage of reddit from tech news sites. Pretty much all of them sound like the authors are also disgruntled users. It can't be good for reddit's stock price (even if it's up at this moment)
The mod situation on Reddit is weird. There is a very small handful of subs where paying mods makes sense, and then a gigantic swath of them where it really doesn’t.
He is absurdly, almost comically overpaid though. To the point that I almost consider it’s an intentional choice aligning with going public so they can say “hey! Look at how big we are! Our CEO makes as much as Facebooks!” Or whatever
I was a mod for a community that had maybe one post every month. It got engagement every time, but there weren't many posts. I never had anything unpleasant to deal with. I sure wouldn't expect pay for that.
But the big subs with hundreds of thousands or millions of users? That's a full time job for a team of 30 people basically.
Every single thread has alerts for a mod to come look at some comment or the post itself. You either ignore it and risk it becoming an issue, or you take care of it.
They deserve more pay than the guys who sit behind desks snorting coke to make big decisions like "let's completely rework the look and force everyone to use it by default"
Yeah, I was the sole mod of a “mid sized” community of around 50,000 for several years. It took maybe 10 minutes or less of “work” in an entire week. For the vast majority of communities, even ones with a few hundred thousand subscribers, it simply does not take that much effort to filter out bad posts and handle reports and similar.
On the flip side, I have personally communicated with a decent deal of mods of major subs like news, politics, twoxchromosomes, etc. and in my experience it’s these subs that tend to get the… stranger dynamics, where a disproportionate amount of the mod team are people who have WFH jobs with essentially no actual workload, they’re stay at home disabled, they’re a NEET in some capacity (or maybe like, going to college but only taking a class or two a semester). Other subs like askscience revolve almost exclusively around discord channels with hundreds of “sub mods” who get together and kind of randomly review content and basically approve it on a lottery system.
So without being too sympathetic I almost get the CEO from a purely business standpoint. I genuinely cannot figure out a way that you would pay some mods at a rate “equal” to their workload, and how doing so would in any way make the site better and not completely fuck things up where people are now exploiting the payment system for profit without actually contributing to the site.
His dumbass reply defending himself is that if the company does well then he does well. Essentially stock based CEO compensation. Fucktard addresses it the same way he addressed the API changes, by attempting to divert attention from the egregious amount onto explaining the concept in its simplest form separate from himself.
He makes $300k/yr in cash and the rest is stonks. Is he comically overpaid? For a CEO of a gigantic social media corporation that he took to IPO?
I fuckin hate spez and I think "billionaire" is a concept that should not exist.
... but what portion of his 300k should volunteer mods get? Should they get stocks? Are they contractors? FTEs? Plenty to be outraged about other than community moderators who volunteer their time for free willingly imo
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy at this point. CEOs explaining their pay being so high by “it’s high everywhere, and if you really think about it we’re managing millions of dollars and big important stuff so it’s not like we stole it or anything right”. Their comp gets higher and higher, we’re getting to the point where they’re now making multiple lifetimes worth what their own employees are making, and it’s all supposed to be normal that they do, cause they’re working oh so hard, aren’t they.
You know who else manages millions of dollars? Government employees, and they don't make 7 figures for doing it
Got everything he wanted inc dealing with shareholders in about a month
Damn it. I coulda made some nice quick cash on a pump and dump. Ipo was at 34 a share and now the price is at $50.
Mods volunteer... I don't see the problem here.
I agree. But also the content and quality of their work would likely be better if they were paid. Probably a much better value to Reddit than Spez having a yacht. Or Spez
Unless the improved quality would result directly in increased profit for Reddit Inc., I don't see why they would bother paying for a service that people will FIGHT to do for free. If you sacked every single mod on Reddit today, most of them would be replaced within a day by more power-hungry individuals that will mod endless content for a simple ego boost.
I don’t know if I agree. Reddit doesn’t seem to have a huge issue with “bad mods” atm (despite what the community says, the website is more popular than ever). I struggle to think of a way to pay mods that wouldn’t absolutely fuck things or immediately drive it into a system where suddenly all these users are trying to maximize their profits or bribe existing mods to be part of the team in order to get Reddit money.
For instance, some large subs operate with only a small handful of mods. Others like the askscience sub operates with literally hundreds of sub-mods. Does each subreddit now need a guild accountant to determine who gets what money?
I don’t like Spez, but I really dont see paying mods as making the site better in any capacity for end users
