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, working in my free time. So, immediately quit and suddenly faced backlash from my fellow moderators in front of users.
Suffice to say, all mods 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.
And remember, because I feel this always needs to be said with such sums…
193 million isn’t enough for him, and 193 million plus whatever millions he made in years prior isn’t enough for him. He’s going public because he’s a broken, disturbed human being that looks at his unethical levels of wealth, enough for most of the other humans that live here to live 2 dozen extravagant lifetimes, and still demands mooooooaaaaaar.
Why isn’t this widely accepted as severe mental illness?! This is hoarding disorder.
These aren’t big ocean house sums. These are buying politicians sums, and they are only achievable through exploiting other human beings and selfishly pocketing most of the value of their labor because you can get away with it.
Is it possible to set a roof on private wealth? Everything above put into public funds? Give them a “you win at capitalism” trophy and let them into some other game to play.
The 1950s had a great thing going. Once you hit $100,000 in a year, anything beyond that was taxed at about 90%. Nobody wanted to give the government 90% of what they’d be making, so no one did, and the 1950’s were absolutely booming for the US middle and lower class. You could afford a new house, car, and two kids at a job you didn’t need a college diploma for (or often even a highschool diploma) on a single income household.
Without having to pay ridiculous sums of money to the ceo’s and executives and whatnot, companies were just left with the option of using the funds to invest back into their companies and their employees instead going after pocketing as much money as quickly as possible.
Yes.
Enforced, adequately high progressive taxation could do that, in fact we had tax rates closer akin to that prior to Reagan, and at one point our highest tax rate was close to 90% as it should be so as to limit accruing enough wealth to warp our society unilaterally beyond their single vote with media and political bribery, but that died a long time ago in the name of “turning the bull loose.”
But then the greediest fucks among us bribed our leaders to get their way, to thunderous applause by idiot conservative peasants and many so called democrats, today’s neoliberals, and here we are, planet burning, terminal stage capitalism, good fucking times. But hey, as long as Bezos can have a second mega yacht to keep his first mega yacht company (he really does look it up) I guess it was all worth our impending collapse.
You know what people did when the highest tax rate was 90%? They made sure they’d still “max out” 25 years from now. They invested in their company reputation and their workers.
I can just picture every modern billionaire vomiting into their mouth at the thought.
Not only would I be willing to give them a trophy, give them a fucking parade, shout-out at the next SOTU, let them sign the original constitution or some shit, whatever the fuck these mentally ill people need to stop destroying society.
Hell keep a leaderboard of who “produced” the most wealth and let them compete with each other. The winner every year gets their name carved in a new " Stanley Cup of Captalism" (the hockey one, not the crazy white lady one). All of that shit would be infinitely cheaper than having billionaires around.
I think the absence of cap also makes super rich people motivated to invest in new projects that could make them even richer. If they don’t have this motivation anymore, it may reduce this investment source, they’d just keep what they have and don’t see the point in doing more with their money. Would the state do that better from taxes money? Maybe
But that means they seek projects that must be profitable and that’s exactly why I want the bloated investment power off their hands and into public projects that value psyche and society in the long run. Profit seeking leads to sick companies like Apple etc. with stances like “the customer should not be able to repair their shit”.
I think better regulation of the market so it benefits the consumers, like what EU tries to do, is more realistic than imagining a state being able to sustainably handle marketable innovation. I don’t think a state would have come out with efficient web search, smartphones or gen AI for exemple.
After they introduced reddit gold, they made enough money to finance the service beyond anyone’s lifetime. Now, all that money is gone.
Reddit has been mismanaged, just like almost every silicon valley or venture capitalist driven business. The goal isn’t to make a business profitable, let alone one that is sustainable or serves society, the goal is to meet a certain arbitrary metric that only serves shareholders at the expense of anything and everyone else.
$200M is still big ocean house money. $200B is buying politicians money. The difference is about $200B.
Hell no… Politicians are cheap AF. You could buy a senator to lobby for your bill for $20K.
For $200M, you could buy the entire senate, house, and presidency for a year.
This is why I finally left, because the asshole started removing his volunteer moderators and replacing them with employees for the crime of protesting his lies and slander of app developers who brought in hundreds of thousands of users, many of whom are now reading this comment because they’re no longer on that sinking ship of a site.
Fuck spez.
your username is Fuck spez.
Spez lives in your head rent-free.
you need to do something more productive than bitching on about some idiots who run a website to earn money
Oh my god you’re right, this is all I do. I have no job, no home, no friends, no family, nothing but this account and this app and my anger towards one person I’ve never met. Right.
spoiler
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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.
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.
That honestly says way more about mods than it does about Reddit. Of course you’re not gonna pay for a task people are lining up to do for free, no matter how much they themselves make.
People do it for free on Lemmy, too. Reddit used to be much more moderator-friendly. I think a lot of remaining mods are just going on muscle memory at this point.
Yes, they do. And while I don’t get it on here either, at least they don’t line the pockets of some shitty company. Some moderation is necessary, and I guess I should be happy about other people doing it for free here.
People do it because they care. I ran /r/StarTrek for over a decade because I wanted a specific type of community to exist that didn’t elsewhere, and reddit made it easy.
Of course, reddit eventually screwed me (and all of us) with their greed and there was no way to move what we’d built. If a nonprofit reddit-like site existed back then I would hopefully have had the foresight to use it instead.
Is it really a secret that Spez was getting paid a ton and the mods were working for free? I mean CEOs always get paid way too much, or else they wouldnt bother taking the CEO position.
Also, Im pretty sure all those reddit moderators were doing it for the feeling of power. I mean, why else would you have career mods running hundreds of subreddits while power tripping over everyone all the time?
I do pity those mods who do it for free.
Honestly. They should be paying to be mods. Lol
It would take a madman to disagree
They could leave the platform, and watch it crumble and burn.
a lot did when the third-party kill happend. i mean, look at the current state of reddit. almost only bots and karma whores posting, but the real core community who really contributed content (bot just reposting stuff but creating it) is being less and less active.
They’re paid with the joy of being powertripping censoring assholes
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.
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.
