Minthara's happy trail

of all the outcomes of being so transparent with management of this site, i didn’t expect salary discourse to be one of them. i can’t imagine they did either. i don’t much care for it.

they’re not making 7 figures here. they love this site and don’t want it to die, but if they don’t think it’s worth making less than they do to maintain it, i don’t think anyone can realistically fault them for that. we all have different tolerances for these things.

there’s already plenty to discuss in terms of management and ideology and whatever, for all the people who can’t just sit and use a website come what may. labour and compensation don’t need to come up. they have to live this job every day, and that’s bloody demanding (just ask Jaiden Animations). they can draw their lines wherever they want, and if those lines are somehow what brings things here to a close (obviously not likely but whatever), i’m not gonna be upset, i will survive.

Its so wild to me that people think people deserve to be paid less money than others and shouldnt be able to support themselves because they think some jobn positions shouldnt be considered as valuable as others all the while talking about how bad capitalism is! Cant believe there's discourse around people wanting people trying to survive to be paid LESS. There's financial strains sure but there's ways to improve that strain that isnt just "pay your workers less money".

To anyone that thinks they're getting paid too much or should take cuts to keep cohost going longer: They deserve more and the only reason they aren't getting it is because they already chose compromises to their salaries in order to try and make an ethical social media platform sustainable for a little longer. If you feel the ethical stance of cohost is not worth the possibility of it's financial collapse, then there are any number of other social media platforms you can use. You're just straight up not entitled to a freely available content hosting platform. Nobody is. And if you think harassing staff into actually worse financial situations for your personal Posting™ benefit is somehow a morally correct stance, you don't belong on this site, and you seriously need to rethink your relationship with social media.

I feel like this salary discourse is coming either from people doing bad-faith "if leftist why iPhone" gotchas, or from people who aren't used to this level of transparency and so don't have a comparison for how modest the pay is for this industry and how extremely common and normal it is for sites to take many years to turn a profit.

it feels like the bad faith actors on this website are trying to collectively role-play as cohost's imaginary CEO

because if this collective salary discourse commentary was coming from an individual in c-suite, everyone would be mad at them. the second its in their back yard- they're very quick to be like "hmmm.... but do you really need to eat or have health care??"

When a business that's in financial distress doesn't pay their workers in favour of some other corporate goal, we call that "wage theft".

"When owners reduce their own salaries, the owners are stealing wages from the owners."

I see this is a troll account after all.

It’s frustrating that nobody seems to mention that 80k salary in cities doesn’t get you nearly as far as you’d expect.

The national median for living comfortably alone is $89,461

• "The salary a single person needs to live comfortably in every U.S. state," CNBC

These are American developers. They are getting paid less than the median requirement to live without struggling in their home country. And you are asking them to struggle more... for what? Why?

Realistically, they should be making MORE money - not less. They deserve to live comfortably, same as anyone else. This sort of "suffer for the sake of your passions" nonsense is capitalistic bullshit, and the same thing that feeds misery and unsustainable work practices in everything from non-profits to healthcare to art. It's "crabs in a bucket" thinking, and only serves to guarantee that people abandon the things they care about because they're unable to support themselves on it without being miserable and (importantly) misery doesn't help anything.

You want cohost to survive? Maybe don't demand that the people running it suffer for you. The capitalist hellscape already demands suffering, and they pay better for it. Leftist theory is supposed to be a BETTER alternative, right? So why are you collectively demanding something worse for its literal "we're trying to run this thing as leftist as we can" flag-bearers than fucking Silicon Valley startups?

The funniest (saddest) part is that any other social media engineering position pays fucking double what cohost does — they are taking fucking crazy pay cuts within their industry to make an ethical alternative work in the first place. The internet is full of cruel little weirdos

for real lol