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, in my free time. So, immediately quit and suddenly faced backlash from the fellow moderators in front of users.
Suffice to say, all mods who 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.
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.
Yes to all of this, except for paying the CEO more. The CEO should get nothing. Running the company should be its own reward.
“Our business model sucks and we don’t want to do the work to pay the people who perform labor for us. Therefore, our CEO deserves a hundred million dollars.”
Yeah, makes sense. Carry on.
But if we actually pay the moderators we have to double and triple check to make sure they earned it.
We’re high IQ tech bros who deserve to be paid millions, but you can’t expect us to work out basic management and payroll techniques literally every industry has implemented!
…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.
If there’s money involved, people become extra greedy. Guess whos greedy in this scenario.
It is a no brainier in the complete opposite direction you proposed
“paying people who create value for your company is too complicated to worry about” is a weird justification
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.
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?
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 to all 3 questions afaik.
No, maybe in some cases, no.
They could leave the platform, and watch it crumble and burn.
I’m going to replace could with will in my head so I can sleep really well tonght
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
I think some have been caught getting bribes years ago.
What are they gonna do, fire me from my volunteer job?
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.
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.
350k a year sounds about right for an experienced software engineer at a large tech-related company. That being said I don’t think Huffman, as a CEO, even actually does any engineering…
His tech experience is limited to modifying others posts after the fact.
And taking credit for the work of his suicidal friend
Mods are paid in their ability to power trip
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.
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.
Greed should be punishable. If we can punish violence, we should be able to punish greed. They’re two sides of the same coin.
This is a very good argument. Thank you. We have stats/quotes from ultra rich to show this backed up with fact.
Most people are too invested and emotionally attached (not saying it is a bad thing) to rise up and do some actual damage, because they’d be throwing their lives out, so not really gaining anything in the end. We need some good ol revolution.
It’s OK though, they offered their top moderators an offer to participate in the IPO and also sent them goodies and snacks, what more do you want ?
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.
I didn’t call to violently overthrow a government, and the irony in the time frame of Washington’s life you decided was important to this conversation.
It is convenient that you only wanted to talk about Washington after the Revolutionary War.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
From the Declaration of Independence itself, the founding principles of the Independence of the USA.
Moderators get a feeling of power. I’ve never heard a reddit mod say they want money.
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.
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.
That network wasn’t built overnight either, though. The same way it was built little by little over time, it can also be dismantled.
I understand the chokehold of network effects. I really do. But what’s the alternative?
Dunno. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that people give spez free labor because he actually has the leverage for it, for now, and the unfairness of that isn’t their highest priority. What I’d like to see is better tools to help users have an easier time using more than one site/network at once, so the prospect of contributing to something other than Reddit is less daunting for typical users. I’m on Reddit, Lemmy, and some other sites, but I don’t really expect most people to be comfortable building a routine of checking a bunch of different sites regularly, or switching entirely to a site without the amount/quality of stuff they want just out of spite or altruism.
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.
Are you saying he’s doing an excellent job on maximizing output?
