Technology

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's also a lie. If the company does well, he gets richer. If the company does not do well, he's still rich.

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.

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.

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.

Millions of dollars of pay are always absurd but this really puts it into perspective

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.

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.