Remember when Spez said it was "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company"? Apparently, that means paying himself $193 million and single-handedly tanking Reddit's profitability right b...

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 954 points –
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Remember when Spez said it was "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company"? Apparently, that means paying himself $193 million and single-handedly tanking Reddit's profitability right b...::undefined

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The truth is he's a jealous little turd of a person. The other reddit founders, the ones with brains and skills, got out early and got paid. Even the dead one was more successful. He wants to drain reddit of money while tanking it. He thinks he's entitled. It's a real shame he reproduced too, the poor kid is doomed with a godawful role model like that.

Ohanion was also a fucking prick, shitting up the company while he was there. All the Ellen Pao stuff and the r/IAMA clusterfuck that led to the first big Reddit shutdown? Yeah that was all Ohanion's doing. Then he let Pao take all the heat for his decisions and get ousted.

There was only one worth a damn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

He was too good for this world, and we are all lesser for his absence.

The myth of Aaron Swartz continues...

He was a big proponent of free speech absolutism. He'd have been more than happy with the jailbait subs, watchpeopledie, fatpeoplehate etc. I really don't think he deserves a free pass just because Reddit wasn't enshittifying while he was around, as it was in a growth phase. It had other problems which needed resolution.

I can see where he picked up that attitude. It was common in the hacker types of the late 90s/early 2000s regardless of where their politics lay otherwise. Around the time he died, many of them were starting to see the monster that was created out of that, but it wasn't really obvious until the 2016 election.

And the idea was that we should be better than that. We're more educated now than people have been since at least the Roman times, and probably ever.

We're supposed to be able to handle free speech absolutism and simply bust through all the bullshit and logical fallacies. We're supposed to have the tools to find the truth, and therefore be resistant to propaganda.

Even after all this, I don't think it's our education that is lacking. It's our lack of community that makes us vulnerable. It's easier than ever to pick and choose who your limited "community" is, outside of family. And there's a reason family is taking the brunt of the pressure now.

The boomer adage of never talking about religion or politics has killed us. People used to fight and die over politics, and now we can't even talk about politics with close family. Better to avoid the subject and just let dad go out and vote for the guy idolizing mein kampf.

It's especially a failure of our churches. One of the few places we still have a third place, a community, and most have failed to lead their people to truly Christian values. How can the way Republicans treat immigrants reconcile with Christianity? Their stance on guns while children are being murdered regularly enough that we can't name all the schools anymore? Go ahead and rattle off the easy four before clicking the spoiler. I'll wait. ::: spoiler spoiler Columbine, Newtown, Sandy Hook, Uvalde ::: Sorry, Parkland, I forgot you. And sorry for all the others I can't name.

The idea that any and all information should be free isn't new. The idea that we should have the wisdom to discern the truth and handle the chaff hadn't been tested so hard in a long time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/

Share Child Pornography

In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.

This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won't make the abuse go away. We don't arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.

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WPD has it's place and there was nowhere on the internet that was nearly as sanitized as it was on reddit compared to other gore sites.

That morbid curiosity in my twenties helped me through a lot.

I guess it's the one I care least about that I listed. Substitute in the overtly racist subreddits, if you wish, as they surely didn't deserve a platform.

You have to admit that comparatively he was the least rotten apple in that basket though.

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What more can you say about a man who lets cats with silicone implants have sex with him?

I've never seen that combination of words before and I never want to see it again.

Give us the source for the implants cats, pilgrim

[citation needed]

On second thought, no, please don't.

Didn’t he make that decision after fanboying with Elon Musk?

The reason these people are so rich is they’re sociopaths willing to grind their users to dust and sift their cremains through a sieve for their elemental nutrients. As a user experience designer, it’s abhorrent to watch, especially since I cared so much and had to give up my career. People like Musk and Hoffman making so much by exploiting people makes me incredibly angry.

The wrong people have money.

SBF did good things with his money.

And all HE had to do to get that money was run the world's biggest ponzi scheme.

i don't get why people take this shit so personally

Rather than try to explain it, I think it's easier to say this. Imagine something you cherish dearly. Now imagine it slowly eroding away into nothing. Would you not be angry and want to prevent that at all costs?

Seeing something so useful go the way of the dodo just because the people in charge of the company want to be rich is infuriating. This could really be said about far too many companies. But IMO, Reddit's situation is more sad because the users are what made the site. The owners/creators just made the platform.

Hey! That's what happened to gaming!

And television and film!

And music!

Just art in general.

It fucking sucks!

I understand your sentiment here, but I wholeheartedly disagree. I think we're living at the beginning of a new renaissance of art. For all the negative things that the internet age has brought, the silver lining is that independent musicians, visual artists, animators, filmmakers etc have the best opportunity of all time to make what they really want to make and get paid for it.

Tbf with gaming, the indie scene is BOOMING, stay away from AAA games and you still get amazing new experiences every year

I had an annual subscription for years because I wanted to support them and they weren't being greedy about it.

Reddit gold was an amazing way to harness the goodwill they'd developed with the community. When it was invented, it wasn't a product to be sold. It was a voluntary way to give back to both the site and your fellow users.

The only bumper sticker I've ever had was snoo.

I believed in them and wanted them to succeed. Moneu and power apparently corrupts.

No I wouldn’t and I didn’t.

I find that harbouring these kind of negative emotions only effects the person having them. I don’t want to drag my own mood down. I left Reddit, I came it and I like it here. The end.

Sounds like an outlook that works well for you, but not everyone has that same outlook

Edit: LMAO someone didnt like this comment enough that they went through my entire comment history and downvoted everything that they could see

For a lot of people, including me, reddit was the place they found community on the internet. After 10 years, it was familiar, it was comfortable... it was home.

The money-grubbing, user-exploiting shifts in policy destroyed that sense of community, and that can't not be personal.

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When I saw this news yesterday, it made me realize I hadn't used Reddit almost at all since the purge last summer. I ran the PowerDelete tool last night to nuke my profile and then deleted my account this morning. 10 years of posts and comments gone but ill be damned if im going to let those posts stay and train AI to make this douche canoe any more money.

It's sad, really. So much humanity just bought for a sum. So much offered with nothing expected in return. There's always someone who will try to profit from stuff like that, and they're always horrible, horrible people.

Such a succinct and well written comment, thanks.

Do you have any way of verifying that it is actually gone? I bet it's just gone from view but the data is still there.

I'll be filing a GDPR claim per account to get my data and have them permanently delete my content and information

I ran the tool and it cleared the sort by new list, but the sort by top list was still full of stuff.

Your probably right, but short of going through and editing everything with nonsense (which could just be rolled back anyways) this at least provides me with some copium.

I ran the PowerDelete tool last night to nuke my profile

Note that the profile only shows the last 1k comments - I did a GDPR request to get my data (took em a few weeks - they have a month the time to do so) and then used that data to find all my comments and replace a whole bunch of comments with GPT-generated bullshit about spez being a poopyhead.

I won't pick up my shit and move, I'll kill the plants, salt the earth and poison the well. Fuck 'em. It's all for shittificating the site for YEARS.

Using power of EU. EU, I belive in you!

Sorry, I'm out of the loop—what's the new news? The article linked is from 2023. What happened recently?

So, with all these negative opinions of reddit and spez, I'm both curious what the business world generally thinks of him, and their plan for the business.

Ultimately, the interesting thing will be if investors will give any money when they IPO.

I personally wouldn't, but because I don't like the leaders. Some people don't care, they just want returns where ever they come.

I'm a bit of a hater for this company, and hope their IPO is a flop. We'll see.

The people with all the money don't care about anything like this. They don't even care about stewardship/long term value building except maybe the Dupont's and old moneyers. Why wait around trying to make or build something when I can just ride the hype train and make sure I get off and onto the next one before the house of cards falls down?

TSLA's market cap is 618 billion dollars

GM's is 45 billion dollars

Shell Oil's market cap is 200 billion dollars

I've decided that's what's wrong with everything at the core -- the only virtue is money and it doesn't matter how you get it. Spez or anyone else could be doing way worse and everyone would shrug.

Yeah, I'm not sure how to curb the trend of money destroying companies and countries.

It's hard to incentivize not being greedy.

There's plenty of billboards/ads/magazines/etc idealizing rich athletes, celebrities, CEOs, etc. There's no MTV cribs for modest/honest/hard working single parents, community volunteers, small business owners who kept their own pay lower to afford employee's medical benefits, etc.

There's no awards show for most humble (ha), most improved, most selfless, most mentor, etc.

I think shame from society was the regulator in the past, but we are in gilded age II so money supersedes morals.

There’s no awards show for most humble (ha), most improved, most selfless, most mentor, etc.

Reminds me of -- Societies grow great when men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.

I definitely don’t think shame played a role. Desire for positive legacy partly, but also for a lot of history kings understood that a peasant uprising provided an opportunity for someone else to take the throne. Look at the Roman Empire. Every emperor was shameless, but some lived lives of careful acknowledgment that all it took was an ally with a dagger to end them, while others died young. Those are the two options, there were no brazen long lived Roman emperors. For most of the 20th century communism was an option if businesspeople fucked around. Today these people fear no consequences

Is shame and legacy not related? Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth suggests they are.

And on emperors, we thankfully don't have that in most of the world anymore. I think the question is, 'what keeps the aristocracy in check' which you're right is partially pitchforks, but there used to be decorum and decency, even if it was pretend for a long time in things like politics and the media.

There's a reason the stockades are cruel and unusual punishment -- We are pressed maybe the most by our peers.

I smoked cigarettes for a long time and wanted to quit but never really could even try. When I moved somewhere where people my age thought it was gross and no one would go smoke with me, it was so incredibly easy -- for example.

If the upper class looked down on each other even a little bit for gutting the poor or the environment or mocking the republic, things would be different I think.

Agree with all.

Will take a significant change for things to revert back IMO.

There's that saying that comes to me, similar to... hard men make good times, good times make soft (greedy/morally bankrupt) men, soft men make hard times.... Now just take the non-gender / misogynistic verson of that as needed :)

The word men/man is actually gender neutral. In old English wereman was masculine, wifman was feminine, and there were a slew of other words that were used for children and various other things. We stopped using the gendered words in middle English.

sounds like the 4th turning. I guess as a nomad its my job to make sure the hero's who will fix this have support.

Plenty of CEOs are psychopaths, it's practically a requirement to rise to the top. The business world would see him as one of their own.

Makes you wonder which came first: the psychopathy or the CEO position. Could be an interesting study to be performed, for sure.

The psychopathy. This isn't unique to CEOs, it applies to nearly anyone in a position of power since the dawn of time.

As they say, power corrupts. So, really we should ask what psychopathic tendencies the CEO had before and after his/her rise to power.

In business, I think it's less that power corrupts. CEO positions aren't being randomly handed to good people. The preexisting psychopathy, i.e. the ability to value money and profit over their fellow humans' livelihoods, is exactly what makes them suited for that position.

A lot of people invest looking not too close, it seems. Those with some knowledge of what Reddit is likely wouldn't, but I think the plan may work.

i feel all price movements of all stocks is all fake. I know only siths deal in absolutes but that is what I see. 1.1 trillion in wealth by the top 12 americans. We need to form a fellowship and quest for these dragons.

Member when everyone was Happy Ellen Cho was gone? Peppridge Farm remembers when that asshole promised not to asshole. He lied.

So, with all these negative opinions of reddit and spez, I’m both curious what the business world generally thinks of him, and their plan for the business.

They probably think he's doing a great job.

Reddit seems like IRL Silicon Valley. They had no idea what they were/are doing, winging everything, and somehow failing upwards. It's a complete bullshit company, and hopefully Wall Street will see it for what it really is at IPO launch.

All of Silicon Valley is just like the show. Some friends of mine couldn't even watch it because it hit too close to home.

Exactly. It was dramatized and way more entertaining than reality but the premise was based on very realistic scenarios.

That's me. I started the first episode and I was laughcringing too hard.

Remember the whole thing with GameStop? Wall Street knows, but they definitely don’t care, as long as they can make a fast buck and get out.

The really titillating question is what happens when reddit collapses as a trustable source of information and google search is then totally useless.

It turns out social networks aren't great businesses unless you heavily exploit the people maintaining those communities.

People end up doing what they have always done, and go elsewhere.

They went to Reddit to begin with, and they can just as readily leave it.

Is that the same Spez who moderated /r/jailbait?

Wasnt that back when you could make anyone a mod, without their permission?

If we're gonna point to things that spez actively has done, then theres plenty of shit..

Like knowingly letting all the pedo subs exist and run rampant (until the news media caught wind and hurt advertising)

Editing people's comments without their input/consents another big controversy with his involvement too.

Yep, i just wanted to stay relevant to his seemingly pro-pedo stance and didnt want to make a comprehensive list.

It was, but that has been dramatized and exaggerated. The comments he edited all said "fuck u/spez", and the edit was obvious.

Y'all make it sound like subtle manipulation, which was presented as a danger, but wasn't what happened there.

It is entirely possible he was tagged as a mod without knowing. At first. But if he wanted to he could have immediately removed himself. And then there's the fact that the main mod of that sub was given some kind of special custom flare

pretty sure it was a pimp flair, cant remember the exact name but it was something like that

Honestly I can't remember either? But I remember for sure it was something unique that was given to him by the administrators.

He meant that Reddit should start behaving more like an 'adult entertainment' company, so basically everyone that provides content for it is getting fucked.

Not to defend Huffman, who's a huge asshole, but...

He wasn't really oaid 193 million. That's the value (on paper) if the stocks and options he received. His actual salary eas 341,000$.

"he wasn't actually paid in money. it was just the value of the gold bullion he received".

Is that better somehow? I never understood this logic. Money itself is existentially just paper with no value until you spend it on something, and its value also rises and falls based on other factors. It's basically stock in the US economy.

Why is it not okay to give someone one kind of paper but not another?

Because those stock grants are conditional on a lot of things. It's not money yet, it's potential money if certain things happen. Yes, those things are likely easily achievable - they either unlock over time, or on the IPO, as long as he is still with the company. But until they vest, they don't fully exist yet.

FWIW, when they do vest the IRS will consider the value of the stock on that day as income. They don't mess around with that shit. Even if he decides to hold the shares, he will still need to pay taxes on them based on their value on the day of vesting, but not before. He has people to advise him on what is best to increase his treasure horde, though.

Are you asking why stock of a single company is different from "stock" of the richest country and only superpower on earth?

Also, money is liquid, can be spent immediately. Stock is not liquid, it has to be traded, vested, etc. and given enough stock will tank yje value if too much of it is liquified at once.

Yeah, they don't sell it or trade it usually, they use it as collateral for loans in cash.

That much stock is not easy to sell, he'd tank the value of the entire company and never retain anywhere near 193M. You could sell that much gold.

Money is not wealth. That's a very big difference.

Separating these things is how the rich avoid paying taxes.

Stocks and options that he's about to unload in the open market, assuming they will be vested. I think that's the real reason why they are opening up the IPO to Redditors. They want a fair amount of the stock - but not too much! - sold to people with an emotional attachment to it, who won't get in the way of their selling.

Note the Trump people playing the same exact game with DWAC.

He can't unload all his stock for $193m.

I don't like the idea of calling it a non-payment when receiving compensation in the form of valuable assets in addition to money.

Receiving stocks or gold bricks or houses or blow jobs, or anything else of value, is payment, and should be taxed as such.

For the record it absolutely is taxed as such. As soon as it vests the IRS considers it income, whether they sell it for the cash or not.

Its a huge headache for startups sometimes. I had team members I wanted to compensate but just giving them the equity would have been an imediate big tax bill on a non-liquid, and speculative, asset. There's ways to massage it (like vesting) but he will absolutely have that taxed.

Oh, and I could be wrong but I think the share value is just taxed as ordinary income, not capital gains. Ie: if the award is denominated in $1 shares, which he sells for $1.10, the $0.10 gets capital gain rates (if he held it for a year) but the $1 is taxed just like a paycheck.

Its a huge headache for startups sometimes. I had team members I wanted to compensate but just giving them the equity would have been an imediate big tax bill on a non-liquid, and speculative, asset. There's ways to massage it (like vesting) but he will absolutely have that taxed.

Is there an equivalent of the sell-to-cover withholding strategy for stocks that aren’t publicly tradable?

I don't see why you couldnt, but you'd need a buyer. Like if you had a funding round you might include in part of your use of proceeds a small buyback/ sell to cover like you're talking about. If the company was doing the sell to coverthats definitely easier cash wise than a bonus but not 0.

All these rules make total sense, they're just hard for really early companies. The lawyer calls alone on this stuff start to add up in a hurry and if you skip them you may have just screwed the people you want to help and muddied things for any future raise.

I think he is fully expecting the 193 Million to tank as soon as it goes public. Hence why he paid himself so much. The value right now is whatever they say it is.

AND it’s the board that decides on his remuneration, not himself.

How much of that compensation is in stock? It's pretty common for executives to be largely compensated in stock, particularly right before an IPO.

I only point this out because the math isn't necessarily as simple as revenue minus executive compensation. Issuing stock isn't a cash transaction for reddit.

His pay was $300k something. So it was almost all stock. To convert his ownership stake into shares ahead of the IPO as you mentioned.

He supposedly owns around 3-4% of Reddit. And they're trying to IPO at an initial valuation of $5B. So when that goes to shit like it probably will this theoretical $192M drops dramatically.

His pay was $300k something. So it was almost all stock.

Ahh, that makes all sorts of sense. The idea that he was paid $193 Million was unbelievable.

You could pay 1,000 moderators $100k for the year and still give Spez $93 Million if that were his salary.

Unless he pumps and dumps them, selling them after the IPO

Selling off shares from insiders is a publicly announced process that involves coordination with the SEC in advance, so "pump and dump" doesn't really apply here. That terminology usually applies to penny stocks that are traded on minor exchanges, where a price increase of mere pennies could represent a very high percentage increase, making manipulating the stock price through fraudulent claims potentially very profitable for the manipulators.

He could sell shares early but that news would also probably very negatively affect the value of the shares he's selling. Not really great when the CEO is not confident of the long term value of his own company's stock.

There is just no reason why Reddit's CEO was making almost 200 million dollars other than short-sighted greed. They weren't even paying him stock options: just straight cash out of the coffers.

I see he went to the Adam Neuman school of business...

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Reddit is used by some 57 million people every day to discuss all sorts of things, like news developments; share memes and favorite recipes; swap stock market tips; and chronicle public photos of bread stapled to trees.

Four of the most popular mobile Reddit apps, including Apollo, have announced they will be going out of business because of the new costly fees for accessing what is called the application programming interface (API), which allows different pieces of software to communicate with each other.

Some subreddits, still upset that Huffman has not rolled back any of the announced changes or lowered the cost for accessing Reddit data, have extended the blackout beyond the initial 48-hour period.

In their last update, organizers of the boycott wrote that "our core concerns still aren't satisfied," adding that "Reddit has been silent since it began, and internal memos indicate that they think they can wait us out."

In 2021, Reddit filed paperwork for an eventual initial public offering but shelved those plans when technology stocks plummeted shortly afterward.

It, along with peer social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snap, YouTube and others, has been dealing with a slowdown in digital ad spending, which has pressured the companies to find new ways to generate revenue.

The original article contains 1,022 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Probably very unpopular thoughts but...

A) How many of us wouldn't angle for an almost 200 million dollar payout? Seriously? All of us are too good for that?

B) Social media like reddit is basically free for users and costs way more than most of us could afford to run. We probably need to figure out some middle ground where people expect to pay a few pennies for something they use for hours a day. Unfortunately, advertising etc has conditioned/conned people into thinking everything should be "free" and with ads.

Most people wouldn't even know what to do with that kind of money, I doubt spez even has use for it all, its just big number goes up.

He should give it back to society and have a humble income, everyone should do this.

As to "B:" we have Lemmy, run by enthusiasm and donations. Maybe one day we will get media like video to an even smaller size and have a federated YouTube style site.

AV1 could actually be huge for PeerTube, now that I think about it

And when you become a multi-millionaire through your work, come back here and respond to this comment to tell us all the charities you’ve given all your money to. Can’t wait.

Epic logical fallacy dude

My political and philosophic idea wouldn't allow myself to have that much wealth, it would be reinvested into society.

Its important to understand that we're not all capitalists

It's not free. Moderators spend their time keeping things sensible and users spend their time creating content, by posting, commenting and voting. Millions of people contribute tiny amounts, giving the community great value. They're the reason the site has any value at all. In comparison, the operating costs, and whatever work the company execs perform, are small compared to the not-at-all free work people in aggregate put into the community.

These are sites premised on free labour but the end user pays nothing to enjoy the site.

As much value is created by those volunteers, the operating/dev costs are very real and can't just be hand waved away.

And you're claiming that people can't expect to use it for free, because they need to pay those costs, which is nonsense. If they have enough to pay a CEO $300k in cash each year in addition to stock options, they are making plenty to cover their operating costs. Thus there's no reason users, who are already brining value to the platform, should pay more in addition to the value they bring. Asking for people to contribute for free and then pay to access what they've built is a crazy business strategy that's bound to fail.

I think you're misunderstanding my point.

You can still use reddit for free, that won't change. That is because to reddit you are cattle, the product, what is being sold.

And as long as you are a product, reddit is going to extract as much value from you as they can. It's why their valuation is in the billions, you are lucrative cattle. And qs someone who has wrangled that cattle, spez is taking his cut.