Reddit CEO Defends His Absurdly High Pay While Not Paying Mods
Reddit CEO Defends His Absurdly High Pay While Not Paying Mods
Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman gifted himself a stunning $193 million compensation package — while mods get nothing.
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The mod situation on Reddit is weird. There is a very small handful of subs where paying mods makes sense, and then a gigantic swath of them where it really doesn’t.
He is absurdly, almost comically overpaid though. To the point that I almost consider it’s an intentional choice aligning with going public so they can say “hey! Look at how big we are! Our CEO makes as much as Facebooks!” Or whatever
I was a mod for a community that had maybe one post every month. It got engagement every time, but there weren't many posts. I never had anything unpleasant to deal with. I sure wouldn't expect pay for that.
But the big subs with hundreds of thousands or millions of users? That's a full time job for a team of 30 people basically.
Every single thread has alerts for a mod to come look at some comment or the post itself. You either ignore it and risk it becoming an issue, or you take care of it.
They deserve more pay than the guys who sit behind desks snorting coke to make big decisions like "let's completely rework the look and force everyone to use it by default"
Yeah, I was the sole mod of a “mid sized” community of around 50,000 for several years. It took maybe 10 minutes or less of “work” in an entire week. For the vast majority of communities, even ones with a few hundred thousand subscribers, it simply does not take that much effort to filter out bad posts and handle reports and similar.
On the flip side, I have personally communicated with a decent deal of mods of major subs like news, politics, twoxchromosomes, etc. and in my experience it’s these subs that tend to get the… stranger dynamics, where a disproportionate amount of the mod team are people who have WFH jobs with essentially no actual workload, they’re stay at home disabled, they’re a NEET in some capacity (or maybe like, going to college but only taking a class or two a semester). Other subs like askscience revolve almost exclusively around discord channels with hundreds of “sub mods” who get together and kind of randomly review content and basically approve it on a lottery system.
So without being too sympathetic I almost get the CEO from a purely business standpoint. I genuinely cannot figure out a way that you would pay some mods at a rate “equal” to their workload, and how doing so would in any way make the site better and not completely fuck things up where people are now exploiting the payment system for profit without actually contributing to the site.
A full time job they volunteer for because being a mod makes them feel special.
Some people really just like flexing whatever Tiny Iota of power they can get and mod positions are perfect for them, at least until they mildly disagree with someone who is either in the right or at least just has a differing opinion.
I'm fairly cynical and think that many (perhaps even most) do it for that little shred of power. But some do it out of genuine passion for a project. I'd be more inclined to suspect the former for controversial topics and anything political, and the latter for subs that are related to fun topics and hobbies.
Of course, but that kind of person already left reddit, or should have
His dumbass reply defending himself is that if the company does well then he does well. Essentially stock based CEO compensation. Fucktard addresses it the same way he addressed the API changes, by attempting to divert attention from the egregious amount onto explaining the concept in its simplest form separate from himself.
He makes $300k/yr in cash and the rest is stonks. Is he comically overpaid? For a CEO of a gigantic social media corporation that he took to IPO?
I fuckin hate spez and I think "billionaire" is a concept that should not exist.
... but what portion of his 300k should volunteer mods get? Should they get stocks? Are they contractors? FTEs? Plenty to be outraged about other than community moderators who volunteer their time for free willingly imo
Perhaps they could get a share of the stonk that covers the other 179.7 million of his remuneration?
Yeah I agree... but that isnt reddit's model at all. It would take a massive restructuring and let's be honest, it would not work.
Also those are unrealized gains which he can choose to cash out if he doesn't shit up the stonk price. Can't put monopoly money in an employee's pocket and call it a salary (per the mods being paid)