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Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

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331–340 of 393 posts

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#331

Posing the question to gain more familiarity with African-Americans in tech: who were the other candidates for this position?

There was a reddit announcement the other day that stated /u/kn0thing was stepping down from the board and requested that a black person fill his place. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcom...

As a non American I don't know how you label things, but can this guy even be considered black? He looks like a regular person from southern Europe.

https://news.yale.edu/sites/default/files/styles/horizontal_...

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit being a private company has every right to control what ideologies are promoted on their pages just as you have every right to start your own reddit clone and moderate it however you feel. This is the exact same reasoning letter by letter that was used against rock'n'roll at that time by republicans. They also didn't use state censorship, just private companies executing their rights. Just saying.

And rock and roll won, didn't it? Everyone knows about rock bands and listens to rock music these days, and nobody cares about the RIAA. They rightfully lost the war.

It did with significant backlash at some point, yes. The RIAA still exists and has quite a reach. It didn't loose any war and it is of no importance if you like them or not.

The point is that censorship was executed with the help of private corporations to circumvent the societal contract to allow freedom of speech, which includes art/music.

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#334

Posing the question to gain more familiarity with African-Americans in tech: who were the other candidates for this position?

There was a reddit announcement the other day that stated /u/kn0thing was stepping down from the board and requested that a black person fill his place. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcom...

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the income from the positions are though - IE would they make minimum wage if that was the only position they had?

Usually public companies publish these figures. As far as I can tell from ones I have seen, they make more than a Senior Engineer makes mostly by RSUs. You can find proxy statement for public companies(Amazon, Google,, they publish it before the annual shareholder meeting which most of the time includes compensation for board members. For example, here is the one Alphabet published recently for 2020: https://abc.xyz/…

From the PDF:

In 2019, we awarded our standard ongoing compensation to each of our non-employee directors, including an annual $75,000 cash retainer payable in arrears and an annual $350,000 GSU grant. We paid an additional $25,000 annual cash retainer and an additional $150,000 annual GSU grant to John L. Hennessy, our non-executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, given his additional duties in the role. We also paid an additional $25,000 annual cash retainer to Ann for her role as the Audit Committee chairperson.We awarded the above-mentioned cash retainers and GSU grants to our non-employee directors on July 3, 2019, the first Wednesday of the month following our 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. The exact number of GSUs comprising the equity awards wascalculated by dividing the target dollar value of the award by the closing price of Alphabet’s Class C capital stock on the day prior to grant and rounding up to the nearest whole share. All annual GSU grants made to our non-employee directors vest at the rate of 1/48th monthly, beginning on the 25th day of the month following the grant date until fully vested, subject to continued service on our Board of Directors through the applicable vesting dates.

And then they have a table with concrete values for each director, on page 38. The median for 2019 is $428,298.

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#336

A dumb but serious question: what powers does a board of directors have? In terms of day to day operations, engineering, product, marketing and so on?

In the US the biggest impact a board can have is the hiring and firing of the CEO. (And the threat of that) They give the CEO guidance, and check performance, but as a group they work through the CEO.

The CEO has to aggregate the needs of both the board and their directs (and customers and suppliers) into a coherent whole. Not an easy job as if everyone gets 100% of what they want the organization can’t function. (In a sense it’s like product management at the company level)

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a reddit announcement the other day that stated /u/kn0thing was stepping down from the board and requested that a black person fill his place. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcom...

As a non American I don't know how you label things, but can this guy even be considered black? He looks like a regular person from southern Europe. https://news.yale.edu/sites/default/files/styles/horizontal_...

My point was, if they really wanted someone who have experienced discrimination against blacks why pick a mostly white African American who most would consider white if they weren't told otherwise?

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if they have a meeting every 3 months, what is the rest of their time spent doing? Sounds like a pretty cushy job.

Even outside formal meetings board members typically use their network (connections or board posts in other companies) to push the company's agenda. Which can lead to business deals or have effect on law or whatever.

This makes a lot of sense now I think about it, but it does seem like institutionalized corruption?

"We have 300K - shall we spend it improving our product or hiring an NED who happens to be VP at a big target enterprise customer?"

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#339
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're so hostile to their own users I'm not sure they get accurate results from their metrics. - They change you back to the new design every few days. - They constantly tell you to use the app (thankfully you can disable this at least). - The old reddit design has a sidebar with helpful content, but this is not automatically present in the redesign. If you're a mod you have to manually copy that content over to th…

> new redesign on mobile web is so bad The funniest part is plenty of 3rd party apps had been doing an amazing job already. All reedit had to do was acquire one of them on the cheap or steal design cues from the ones that were most popular. Instead they created this monstrosity which till date lags behind many 3rd party apps in features and fluidity. > old.reddit RES is the only way to use reddit, and they can pry it…

Their goal is not to make a good website, their goal is to show you ads.

Re: Reddit Welcomes Michael Seibel to Board of Directors

#340
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very little in terms of day-to-day, unless a board director decides to make it his/her mission to change something at that very low level. The board meets typically quarterly (monthly depending on the circumstances?) and is generally focused on higher level questions like the company's growth trajectory and forecasts, major problems, compensation strategy, hiring key executives, fundraising, M&A, etc. Like I mentione…

So if they have a meeting every 3 months, what is the rest of their time spent doing? Sounds like a pretty cushy job.

They are often named in lawsuits. The cushy $100k/yr can easily be eaten up by legal fees.
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