PoliticalAgitator @ PoliticalAgitator @lemmy.world

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Plenty of them didn't, so reddit replaced them with scabs.

He actually sold out early in a much more obvious, objective way.

Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million. Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.

That's a tiny fraction of his current compensation. He then spent a while backpacking around and started a mediocre company that's since closed down.

He is neither a shrewd businessman, coding god, nor visionary genius. He's just some guy that was in the right place at the right time.

The same is true of practically every executive pocketing grotesque compensation, with the only difference being "the right place at the right time" is more often "in a rich woman's womb" or "at an extremely expensive school".

He isn't being paid $200 million a year for his talent. He's being paid $200 million a year because instead of paying staff better wages, or not enshittifying the site, or paying moderators and content creators, he simply pocketed that money for himself.

It's what this neoliberal utopia always is. Executives stealing workers wealth and claiming they earned it for stealing so much wealth.

The best thing about his deeply fuckheaded comments is that it's a perfect example of the sick way the ultra wealthy operate, presented in a way reddit users can absolutely understand.

The act of building early reddit was a group effort. I have no idea how much Spez contributed to the concept, but he did code it -- a task that realistically millions of people also would have been able to do.

But a platform without users is nothing. It was the users creating content that truly built reddit and the unpaid moderators who stopped it collapsing under the weight of spam and extremism.

While that was happening, spez shit the bed over and over again. He sold out too early. He openly advocated platforming extremists. He got called out for the bigotry he tolerated in his company. He alienated his most important users so he could sell their content to AI companies.

And now here we are. He makes an absurd amount of money, despite being shit at his job, despite being a clearly bad person and despite his accomplishments being ordinary. Meanwhile, the people he needs, who are critical to his business, are paid nothing.

This is the same setup as Amazon, Walmart, Uber and a million other businesses, distilled down to its very essence.

This isn't normalisation, it's celebration.

I'm not going to be coy about why they're celebrating him either: The pro-gun community spends hour after hour theorycrafting about how they can shoot people with their cool guns and get away with it. Kyle is being celebrated for finding a new "get out of jail free" technique that specifically targeted undesirables for murder.

That's all there is to it. They shower him with fame and money because he killed BLM protesters with America's favourite gun. It's his reward.

Yep. When someone inevitably looks through the voting history on these kinds of comments, I won't be shocked if they find its 4 people and 50 sock puppets.

I would be shocked if the gun lobby weren't astroturfing though. They oppose red flag laws, take money from Russia and give tens of millions of dollars to the most revolting, far-right Republicans in the country. They're hardly going to draw the line at lying on social media.

A decent chunk of gun owners would be willing to give up their weapons if it legitimately helped society substantially

Those are not the views of the people who represent them, nor does it routinely turn up in dicussions about gun control.

There's also legitimate reasons to have a gun if you have a home in a high-crime area or are otherwise a target.

If guns actually delivered on this promise, America wouldn't have "high crime areas" in the first place. It would be the safest country in the world by a huge margin.

Instead, the crime rate in the USA is functionally identical to other wealthy countries, only with a layer of gun violence on top that the rest of the world simply doesn't have.

Americas gun laws help far more criminals than they dissuade. Even in the rare cases where a criminal can't just buy a gun from any store that sells them, "responsible gun owners" arm hundreds of thousands of criminals every year with their poorly secured firearms.

Why would you lump those groups in with NRA lobbyists?

If they don't like being lumped in with lobbyists, reactionaries and idiots, they can take it up with them because I'm not going to include a 5 page "not all gun owners" disclaimer at the top of every post so that nobody gets their feelings hurt. This shit is killing people for fucks sake.

It doesn't matter if they're blessed by the Pope himself. The people who run the instance get to decide what moves through it.

When the people using a free service you're not obligated to provide try and shame you for not taking on multimillion dollar legal departments.

They hate when you refer to the legal gun owners who do mass shootings and execute their partners as "former responsible gun owners".

Not enough to stop selling domestic abusers guns or anything, but boy do they get pissy.

I can't even get the stability I need out of it on Windows.

His opinions are too important for things like "reading articles".

Anything that doesn't suck the dick of the gun lobby. Easily that. Second place isn't even close. Even just asking "how?" when they claim their guns are the solutions will get you downvoted. They'll ask questions and then downvote you for answering.

And of course, it's only in threads on gun violence (when they're doing damage control) or about marginalized groups (when they're drumming up sales). Make the same comments under a post they haven't thought to brigade and they won't be even slightly unpopular.

So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy

Nope, that's just you being melodramatic. The judge has acknowledged there is grounds for the case to be argued so it won't he dismissed. That's all. They haven't been found guilty of anything. They're not being lined up and shot.

What would you prefer we did to determine if a company is culpable? Just ask you because you read a headline?

I downvoted it because it was dumb as fuck.

You mean the "responsible gun owners" who don't properly secure their weapons from a child?

No other country has this problem. Is it because they teach gun safety to literal toddlers?

But of course the answer isn't major police reforms, it's just "buy a gun and start blasting".

If you are in a marginalized group, cops are more likely to victimize you when you need help rather than actually helping.

If you're part of a marginalized group and holding a gun, they'll kill you where you stand and there won't even be a trial.

In the US, kids are going to find guns, because some owners are going to be lazy, careless, or just tired and not thinking straight.

Then the conditions for being a gun owner are vastly too permissive and the punishments for negligence are vastly too light.

The fact that you just skipped straight over this to blame schools and parents shows that your opinions are already hopelessly compromised by pro-gun rhetoric.

According to the pro-gun community, themselves a notorious source of unreliable information. Their opinions on Everytown are about as reliable as anti-vax groups opinions on the WHO (and for exactly the same reasons)

Yeah, this reeks of generic neoliberal sabotage to me. They do the same thing with unions and political parties. If anything is a potential threat to profits, it's infiltrated and undermined.

There's simply no way that a team focused on employee rights does something like this. Everybody working there would definitely be aware that companies routinely try to identify and punish people for their posts. That alone would end any non-malicious plans for using real names.