this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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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... (www.npr.org)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

This might help you understand the issue with reddit, which apparently has yet to ever cover its operating costs within a year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2024/02/26/reddits-ipo-filing-shows-lots-of-losses-after-nearly-20-years/

Kind of eye opening, even if you vaguely understood the situation beforehand.