• whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:

    1. Cut CEO pay by 90%
    2. Pay mods as employees, think of the GM/guide structure of early mmos where you start as a volunteer for a free sub but can work your way up
    3. Subscriptions to remove ads
    4. Push ads in API for third party apps to host your ads, remove for subscribed users
    5. Profit sharing from ads and subs with top content creators
    • Zink@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Just imagine having a website that makes no money, and you get paid so much to run it that if you got a 90% pay cut and quit after a year you’d still be set for life.

      • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 months ago

        Capitalism.

        Basically entities flush with wealth do not make their decisions out of a sense of economic survival.

        Capitalism is all about brutal survival for the lower classes and for the upstarts without any background.

        At the same time capitalism is all about a decision making process that is leisurely, capricious, and forgiving for the aristocratic upper classes.

        If the company is sufficiently large (don’t know if reddit qualifies, but my past employers have, so speaking from experience here), their own upper management is robbing the company on the inside every day when they make deals with contractors by taking kickbacks as opposed to what benefits the company. Make no mistake, all the upper management that is sufficiently aristocratic are looking out for their personal interests instead of the company’s. In other words the same mentality of personal gain at all costs that supposedly drives the creation of some of the companies is also their undoing. “Greed is good” capitalism eats itself. Large ultra consolidated/merged corps are every bit as bureaucratic and internally Machiavellian as any government can hope to be. Their very existence is a tax we all pay and we don’t get a vote about how these corporate fiefdoms run both themselves and us.

        Reddit at this point is a very important and well backed propaganda tool, the backers can afford to pay their CEO and there is no hurry to make profits, and they have plenty of time and resources for every manner of business mistake.