Fuck spez
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.
It just got so bad. I can’t imagine how terrible it is now. I would love to see post pandemic stats.
I still surf both. Unpopular, I know, but Lemmy does not yet have the super niche communities that barely exist on reddit.
Imo, it’s about the same. Some subs have gotten worse, some have gotten better, but that’s how it’s always been.
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.
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.
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.
I think he’s the real reason the punchablefaces subreddit got neutered, because he’s sure got one.
Spez is such a fuckin tool
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?
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.
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
Surely it costs $193 million to pay him in stock. That stock would otherwise have been sold for that amount to other people, and he’s getting it for nothing.
Because you’re exchanging stock worth $193 million for an equivalent amount of dollars, there’s technically no profit or loss involved in the transaction. In the same manner, when paying stock as a compensation, you secure services valued at $193 million for an amount of shares worth the same: the transaction is entirely equal. So you don’t make or lose any money by paying in stock.
Of course, the trick is that the value of the CEO’s work for one year can be whatever he says. If your claim is that they could have gotten more value out of the stock had they sold it in the IPO, I think you are absolutely correct in that regard.
Tax these mother fuckers. He probably paid next to no tax on that wage. Instead he should have paid 70% in taxes at least
