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.
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.
It’s called tax and all countries do it except for the fucking United States that has spread a disease of letting companies and billionaires just skip taxes, in a criminal mob act that is robbing the people of their money in an open corrupt way that nobody dares stand up against
All countries? Uh, Russian, Indian, and Chinese billionaires have much more freedom to do whatever they want.
In the US, Donald Trump (who claims to be a billionaire) is currently being fined $450 million dollars for underpaying his taxes. He accrues $110K per day in interest on that fine. And he was President of the US!
I knife it was hyperbole
Here’s the thing… Money is just a points system after you get into the .1%. A billion dollars, with 5% non-compounding interest (ridiculously conservative) would yield $50 million a year. That’s a metric fuckton of money, I can’t imagine a luxury (not based on rarity or shaping society) that you could personally enjoy.
So I agree, we should take all their shit, except a single home and personal possessions, and give them a $50 million dollar stipend each year. Let’s pin that to the minimum wage and call it absolute rich. Hell, let’s let them divide it up between their children… Their family would be set for generations, and any of them could go for the prize to add another one time prize to go even higher. Let’s make it fancy as hell, give them a special card or a jeweled broach they can pull out and buy anything without seeing a price… And let’s make it not roll over, because we want them to be post-money
Now, the finances work out easily if we let the government invest money (crazy that we don’t use that instead of taxes at this point), but the trouble is it’s not about money, they need a new game to play. We want to make sure they fuck off and measure dicks with each other in a way that doesn’t use our species as the playing board. They want to compete with each other for rank and social status, and we want them occupied
I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution, so I’ll throw out some ideas. A children’s card game, next level Pokemon go battles, a monthly token that can be granted by anyone (with physical proximity) to signify they were helped by an unbillionare, unbillionare exclusive sports (I’d watch), maybe even points for how much of their stipend they don’t spend in a year
We can even let them prestige, and see if with a small gift of $5 million dollars they can do it again… By that point I’m guessing their brains have probably rotted, but I’d like to give them the option
Maybe we give them nicer badges that they can whip out based on points, maybe we make a points store where they can use the emergency alert system or rent out monuments for a pizza party… Just things that money can’t buy and don’t meaningfully hurt the rest of us
Personally, I really love the idea of video game duels and MMA matches (either we laugh or they improve themselves to a point it’s actually impressive, win-win. Let’s stream it)
Let’s bring back the nobility, but in a way that’s fun for us and doesn’t include ownership of people. Hell, let’s add in titles, and let you get in through capitalism, scientific breakthroughs, or social change
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.
Once you get to that level of wealth it becomes a mentally ill competition game. It’s no longer about the money or what you could or will do with the money, it’s trying to get yourself into higher tiers of even more abhorrent wealth accumulation.
“How did you get here? Business class?”
Laughs the people with private jets
“Where are you staying? A resort?”
Laughs the people with a house in every city
“Where will you go when we end the world? Not my bunker”
Laughs at the people without bunkers
$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.
Even the more premium offerings, like supreme court justices, are getting to be pretty reasonably priced and they often run deals, too, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye out and shop around for the best price.
Help a brother out if you will, use my referral ‘JUSTICE3’ so we both get free services for 3 months
Have we tried crowdfunding that?
I think you over estimate the cost of politicians.
Unlike the cost of ocean-front housing, they’re not listed.
There’s been plenty of stories that have come out that it took a relatively small amount to buy important votes. At this point they should just crowd fund buying out these guys. At least it would drive the price up and make it more transparent how shitty some of these people are.
There’s a yacht, and then there’s a yacht.
And he’s accomplished so hilariously little compared to the other billionaires out there. Not that they deserve billions either, but look at Google and the ridiculous progress they’ve made, and innovations they’ve created, and code they’ve open sourced. Steve wants to be among such “peers” in terms of wealth while having done relatively nothing.
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
Him living rent free in his head is living rent free in your head broski. fuck that, you should pay him rent for his living rent free experience living in your head
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.
Well if you say so, MenacingPerson.
Menace lives rent-free in his head?
You spent all this time writing this because his comment is living rent free in your head lmao. At least he is raging against a billionaire, you’re raging against a lemmy comment lmao
Reddit is fun user here, exactly. I left the moment I read about the API bullshit.
Yup, same. RIF app was how I loved browsing reddit, and it shutting down over the API cost was devastating. Add in the forced removal of mods who didn’t re-open their communities that were protesting was the final nail in the coffin for me. Fuck their IPO.
How does it feel letting someone live inside your head 24/7 without charging for their stay?
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.
Oh hey, I recognize you. Genuinely and truly, thank you for your years of service. I run a mastodon community these days for the same reasons, and I can only imagine how frustrating and eventually heartbreaking it must have been for long-time reddit mods to slowly get screwed out of the homes they’d built for themselves and others.
🫡
Those mods volunteered for the community, not for the company and certainly not for spez. However by turning reddit into a profit machine, spez is exploiting the volunteer work they did, and in the process, destroying it. reddit as an IT product is worthless, the communities are the value.
Take Open Streetmap. It’s been built by the community for the community. So many contributors who volunteer. Imagine it was a proprietary product and one day they start charging for it. Is that not theft from the people who actually built OSM for free?
Sure there are some mods on reddit who are doing it for their community.
Let’s be real though… the vast majority of mods in any online community are fief lords. They do it because having power over other people feels good.
I think I might know part of the reason they aren’t turning a profit…
This was my take away. They paid 1 individual over twice the amount they lost last year. That fix is easy math to me.
The king Solomon method?
And their content creators are also paid nothing.
But their content is now valued and being sold at a contract of $60 million a year
It’s not wise to pay people for stolen content. Even reddit’s description admits they don’t make anything.
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.
The disconnection between the crowd-sourced content (original stuff and commercial articles) and Reddit’s heavy handed dismissal of users always felt weird.
The fact that they (with user help) aggregated OTHER BUSINESS’ content without recompense was a mystery. Like, you didn’t even need to go to the other site to read it.
The mods might actually spend money to run bots and other moderation tools on their own servers. Might even pay reddit for api usage too for using those tools.
Whose fault is it though? I get that collective will is hard, but you as an individual have the power to move, organize, mobilize, whatever you want.
The company doesn’t value you? Move. Why are you giving this company free labor?
For the “prestige” of being a (“anonymous”) reddit mod? Give me a break. There’s better things to do and be prouder of in life.
Stop giving this company time, money, and attention. And tell others to do the same. Otherwise, you’re digging your own (and everyone else’s) hole.
Yes, it’s unfair, but it’s an unfair system. So let’s all do our part. And let’s also organize and mobilize on that. Can’t be done by continuing to feed it.
Absolutely. I quit Facebook about a dozen years ago, Reddit was there to take its’ place.
Then my final visit to Reddit was on June 11th I think it was, the moment the first protest started I quit Apollo for the very last time.
Somewhere around this time, probably earlier, I did the same with Twitter.This time, it was Kbin/Lemmy that were there, the only viable options, still tiny and awkward, the sudden influx still only a fraction of what Reddit has, yet it flooded the system like a bucket of water falling on top of a fly.
And yet here I am, and so are you, and many others. The variety and portions of content are still much smaller than Reddit, but this place has something that Reddit also had: a quality community, apparent from these discussions, or go look at the art in ArtPorn or TrafitionalArt, or sure, absolutely why not - the shitpostings.
This place pushes that intellectual button for me. And now I also give myself time to do the NYT Crossword and watch physics/cosmology videos on YouTube.
I think a lot of them just want whatever community or information hub their sub represents to exist at all, but they know their userbase isn’t actually committed enough to migrate to another site against the grain of network effects.
That network wasn’t built overnight either, though. The same way it was built little by little over time, it can also be dismantled.
I understand the chokehold of network effects. I really do. But what’s the alternative?
Dunno. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that people give spez free labor because he actually has the leverage for it, for now, and the unfairness of that isn’t their highest priority. What I’d like to see is better tools to help users have an easier time using more than one site/network at once, so the prospect of contributing to something other than Reddit is less daunting for typical users. I’m on Reddit, Lemmy, and some other sites, but I don’t really expect most people to be comfortable building a routine of checking a bunch of different sites regularly, or switching entirely to a site without the amount/quality of stuff they want just out of spite or altruism.
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?
Look at it from the other side.
They were there when their subreddit was starting very, very small. Over time, with great effort and as a labor of love, their community grew to numbers they never dared to imagine possible, a successful buzzing community that gave them great frustrations and thrills, anxiety and joy. In a very real sense, this is their baby, they have been through thick and thin together. To hand this over to some indifferent, greedy and abusive asshole… the thought is too much to bear.
These people are suffering. They have a sense of belonging to a community that is being held hostage. To accept they were tricked and are being exploited is a horrifying thing to do.
Why would anyone buy shares in a company that is not profitable, nor may never be profitable. Even they wrote that in the IPO. What would a buyer of shares be buying a share of?
Maybe in 2022. 2023 had 25% of the VC deal volume that 2022 did and 2024 ain’t looking any better.
The age of cheap capital has finished. Unless you’re already healthy or can demonstrate a reasonable path to profitability, later-stage VC is actually really hard to find right now. Angel capital still abounds for people with good track record.
But it’s a tough environment for Reddit to do an IPO in and they probably know it. But they have no other option - they can’t continue into series H, J, Z. Those days are gone.
You live in a world where people are buying NFTs, and you find THIS surprising?
Well, you get the shares “cheap” because it’s not profitable and hope that they turn profitable, e.g. by selling user data, or paywalling everything like Twitter. The mods make $0. For them, it’s probably more like: Why are the mods only paying us $0? How can we maximize that?
Such a scam website - all the content is provided and moderated for free, the CEO steals anything resembling profit, the investors are all left with empty pockets. Fuck spez and anyone still using that site.
Yeah. And the crap floats to the top too. Places like the Donald and femaledatingstrategy persisted way too long
For 193 million I would also let people write ‘fuck u jeena’ for two months.
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.
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