He got around $1.1M in cash.
> According to an SEC filing, Huffman got a salary of $341,346 in 2023 and a $792,000 “incentive” bonus. In February, Huffman’s salary was raised to $550,000 with the bulk of his $193 million compensation package tied to stock.
Ultimately it's the other shareholders paying these compensation packages. They may sometimes be well deserved, but discussing and criticizing them is fair too.
Sometimes courts do strike down excesses. Elon Musk's $55 billion package was voided by a Delaware court because the Tesla board didn't follow proper procedure. (I.e. not because he didn't create shareholder value — he absolutely did! — but because the process was flawed.)
Regardless of the amount it's a particularly egregious example of profiting from other people's hard work.
Their free labor is compensated by something else, probably status or power, obviously, so it's not clear that anyone is being taken advantage of.
They work to promote people, products and companies from the boring to the new, the safe to the illicit.
It's exactly the same with Musks twitter: getting the power users who are paid to tweet to pay the platform.
a sub with sponsorship maybe
Some work for the companies that a subreddit may be centred around, others get kickbacks from those looking to promote products and my favourite are the state actors who help to ensure certain viewpoints dominate.
But of course Reddit has been happy to turn the other cheek to all of this over the decades. Anything goes so long as it doesn’t end up in the media.
This neo-$whatever belief in that commercial entities can replace community run things can't die off soon enough.
Maybe people are ok with companies making money from their free work as long as the company does not antagonize the people offering free services just to milk every drop of money from other peoples handwork.
It used to be that forum owners had to beg their users for money to keep the servers going. Which is also not a great situation. But now it seems like it swung completely in the other direction, with users having to beg the forum owners to keep/add things they use.
Exploitation, when it’s so voluntary, is definitely a dance that takes two. Both parties are responsible for the situation that arose. The abused party, of course, we can sympathize more with. But they could always have chosen and even today they can choose to not engage anymore.
But it doesn’t. Exhibit A: Reddit moderators. (Exhibit B: this thread, and this comment.)
If you find value in moderating, moderate. This is purely a problem of sour grapes—Reddit never pretended to be an Altman-esque non-profit.
Which isn't making it a better argument, since there are many reasons why online communities form where they do, and "community-run" platforms aren't necessarily an option.
This platform isn't "community-run" either, and yet the parent commenter is participating here (and thus is "the problem" too), so I think they should get off the high horse.
Sounds harsh, but this is the correct stance.
The free labour you provide is not only "your loss". There are second order effects: you effectively make it harder for others to compete with said commercial entity.
This includes salaried employees of competing companies whose wages you effectively press down. And even other volunteers and non-profits, because defending and sustaining their project in face of "free inputs, for-profit outputs" competition is that much harder. Community projects die because of this.
"Working for free for a commercial entity" is just a bad idea all around. You exploit yourself (whatever, your choice, you may be getting other kicks out of it) and harm others.
...which, according to you, is a "bad idea all around", since you exploit yourself and harm others.
So, why are you acting against your morals and judgement?
The town drunk telling you to hand the barkeep your keys does not detract from the validity of their point. Try to approach things from the strongest avenue possible, otherwise things devolve into guttersniping.
And the point is, at some point, you have to get it out there somewhere in order for it to have been said. The only concern I have with the points being made here; is the paradox of FLOSS. We must have a public, free and in the public trust corpus of software. Locking everything behind for profits just leads to computing definitely being inaccessible to most everyone. Yet look at all the value extraction bootstrapped on FLOSS stacks where companies get bootstrapped around the composition of a few primitives; but inevitably hooked by the caste of management/MBA types, or utilized as social engineering lever by governments. See social media, car manufacturers, IaaS now, finance companies, banks, etc ...
It is a most concerning trend.
Yes, that's the "other kicks out of it" above. Already covered.
More importantly:
> You just provided free content (a brief opinion piece) for publication on a commercial entity (HackerNews, run by YCombinator)... ...which, according to you, is a "bad idea all around", since you exploit yourself and harm others.
If HackerNews is indeed a PR branch of some commercial entity, then people posting here for free provide value (which is not to say any of my comments do…) to that entity. Potentially harming alternative forums, whether free or commercial. The point stands.
> So, why are you acting against your morals and judgement?
Good call. I guess I didn't perceive HN as for-profit. Perhaps OP's "At some point" is now, for me.
Props to you for consistency! No more questions.
Ideally, forums like this would be some sort of cooperative structure owned and run by those who wish.
I'd love to see r/AskHistorians break off as a co-op who earn their own money and use it to resource history-based activity. They put so much value in that others leech off.
I think the difference is that you created your own forum and community on Reddit under the pretense that it is yours. Reddit more or less sucked up the existing forums. And then Reddit throws more and more ads in your face and siezes control of the means of memeing.
HN seems to be run in a different way. Many of the old forums were run by commercial entities, but at the time they did not try to profit from the forums in such a in your face way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RDDT/comments/1bhr6uv/amalmosta_ans...
(Stack Overflow toyed with going over to the Reddit side, but they have backed off for now.)
Andy Jassy, Amazon: $1.3 million (a big fall from $212 million the year before)
Jensen Huang, Nvidia: about $21 million
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta: about $26 million
Satya Nadella, Microsoft: about $55 million
Tim Cook, Apple: about $100 million
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet: about $226 million
It’s not very surprising to see that a CEO (u/spez) who’s actively driving the company into the ground gets an atrocious pay. I hope all the large investors in the Reddit IPO ‘lose their shirts’. The hype can’t get any louder.
Sorry if this is negative, but like wtf have they been doing to it over the last 10 years.
As a plus, the native app IS great. But at what cost bros.
You may be the only person in the world who thinks that, who doesn't also work for Reddit.
- Some subreddits are so politically biased, that you really need to know the political leaning prior to using them. Getting locked out of huge subreddits like r/worldnews is easy as pie, if you just write the wrong things on certain topics.
- A bunch of subreddits automatically get closed/locked due to lack of moderators.
- There are so many different rules to follow. Just posting something in a random sub comes with a 50/50 chance of your post getting removed or shadow-banned.
And let's not even start on the straight up enshittification of the platform features. I fully expect reddit to become a completely close-off / walled garden app that follows the worst TikTok practices. As long as I can use old.reddit, I'm happy, but I think we all know that it will disappear one day.
As for the compensation...yeah, outrageous comp when the site is feeding off free work.
And the usual corporate response from the CEO "The board decides my compensation, and if the website does well then so do I"
Reddit has god awful UX/I and makes moderation very difficult. They could help themselves with very simple features like post templates and flows, but instead, every semi-popular subreddit faces a daily onslaught of low effort users posting repetitious garbage. Users will feel frustrated by seeing the garbage, but also launch into righteous complaints about mods if they're moderated.
They also make it clear that a post is being held for moderation and then encourage the user to message the moderators directly, so now you have low effort, high volume, and a guaranteed sense of immediate opposition.
The real takeaway for me is that at this point, Reddit is popular because it's popular, not because it deserves anything.
Some genuinely like the topic they're moderating, but they often get burnt out by how shitty the job is.
Gotta start somewhere.
It’s like Wikipedia going public with the expectation that it would continue to hold any value going forward. The proposition can’t hold true.
I figure the price will track the AI bubble, so probably go up, then crash and burn when investors realize LLMs are good tools, but not $30 a month good to most business clients. But the execs and board will make of quite handsomely by then
Reddit is among the most-trafficked websites on the planet. Its value has little to do with AI and everything with attention.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1atb6ac/reddit_has...
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/reddit-says-its-made-203m-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/15/ftc-investigating-reddit-ove...
Attention sells ads. A social graph is something else. About as relevant as yelling about AI potential. Maybe it’s there. But again, a separate argument.
I have noticed that any time I encounter a post from an r/{placename} sub, it appears to be full of the most irritating, racist shit-stirrers but I just steer clear of those subs altogether.
I've never noticed this type of activity, so it's definitely not the "entire place". I assume this is largely relegated to the top level subreddits?
I have mixed feelings about all the crap going on behind the scenes with this company. For the most part, it's been the only place I can get relatively unbiased takes and info outside of more specialized enthusiast forums.
Sure. Not relevant in the context of $800+ million of revenue [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
Seems like a loopholes that civilised society should close.
The other mods are complaining that they are doing some very noble work and are doing it for free. That's how noble work goes. It is thankless.
If any mods want money, I think they should be allowed to pin sponsored threads and use that for referrals. Oh wait! They can do that already.
I guess they are trashing on the CEO for not giving them a network of sponsors whose ads they can pin and make special money.
Which, they have never made a profit, "Now, Reddit — which is not yet profitable"......"Reddit reported a net loss of $90.8 million in 2023, a narrower loss than the $158.6 million loss it netted in 2022." https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-busine...
That of taking a company public.
I get where you’re coming from. But Reddit, given its heritage of leadership, is a weird hill to take a stand on.
I know it's naive but cutting the CEO's (and rest of C suite) salary to normal employee levels would fix that loss down to 0.
Now do it with cash flow.
Although the compensation package won't cash so the situation isn't quite that simple.
No, the important distinction is "is that coming from cash or stocks". The cash component of salaries goes in the profit&loss account. See https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
Revenue $804m (!), expenses $944m (!). But I'm having trouble working out which of the expenses breakdown entries has the board salary in. And if it's compensation in stock, does that have to be expensed?
This is outside the domain of unpaid moderators’ unless the CEO’s compensation is threatening the company’s survival. It clearly is not.
The compensation did not lead to unprofitability—it contributed to it. And we have no evidence by which to claim it would have been worse under less-paid management. (Well, with Reddit, we might.)
I’m not defending the compensation per se. But arguing everyone at any profitable entity should be paid less until the venture is profitable, irrespective of any other facts, is silly. Particularly when it comes to non-cash compensation.
This is the argument usually made for redundancies: reducing the overall payroll.
It’s for increasing profits. Redundancies are reduces at profitable and unprofitable firms alike.