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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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they're really trying to kill Reddit aren't they
My theory is that reddit just doesn't make enough money to stay open without external funding, and as they started running out of that they desperately hired anyone they thought could make the company enough money to stay afloat.
And the dumbass ideas we keep seeing from them are the result of that. Anything to get a buck, no matter what it means to the user experience.
I think its about their plan to go public and some hedge fund bros told them if they want a sugar daddy then they have to implement more agressive ads and subscription fees to juice valuation. I hope it massively backfires.
They have is ways to socialize online (reddit, Twitter, fb) and then people realized they could use them as a tool for good. They could organize, spread the word about bad companies and people, encourage others to do good, and so on. People could even turn on the platforms when those platforms corrupted.
So yeah, the billionaires in control don't like it that we have ready ways to call them out. Elon was pissed about people tracking their flights on Twitter and bought the platform and it's running it into the ground. Why not. He loses nothing and gains everything.
I think we'll see this happen a lot more. Billionaires control everything and then we act surprised when they shut people out that expose them.
Paired up with Governments around the world realizing "oh shit, the masses can easily organize and turn against us"... Here Elon, buy this platform and toast it, we'll make sure you're compensated, bro.
I don't think that's what happened, with Twitter at least.
Elon pissed off the wrong people at the SEC and FTC playing stupid pump and dump games with stocks by using Twitter and his absurdly undeserved reputation as an unconventional super genius with his mega group of followers.
One of the biggest of these, was pumping and then dumping twitter stock by alleging that he'd buy the company. And the people he'd pissed off in government basically saw their opportunity to fuck him by literally forcing him to buy it at his stupidly overpriced valuation - that's why he played all sorts of dumb games dragging out the purchase and trying to get out of it.
And so now he's stuck with an unprofitable company he didn't want. I'm pretty sure he's running it into the ground on purpose so he'll be able to carry that loss balance forward eternally, using it to get out of paying taxes by writing off the loss.
Unfortunately reddit , twitter etc will never die. There will always be a subset that will keep using the platform no matter what. The only thing that can kill it is when company starts making huge loss without any user base but that's a slow death until the said subset stops using it.
They don't need to die, they just need to become irrelevant and for the fediverse to take over.
Yeah, however small the user base, they still have value. Even in a worst-case—Chapter 7—situation, somebody would buy the names and logos.
imagine this happens and then the Reddit codebase turns out to be too much work to maintain so it just becomes a Lemmy/Kbin/similar instance lol
Alternatively they could get bought by Google and be sunsetted within six months because the devs got bored.
I just had to check, reddit isn't publicly traded yet. My best explanation was that spez had a strawman short 200x the amount of reddit stocks and then run the site so hard into the ground that even Musk would go whoa and Malagassy geophysicists would be getting strange readings on their seismographs.
Now? No, they're not actively trying to kill reddit. It's the classic case of someone who got lucky with a startup and didn't hand it off before crashing it.
They should have IPOd in 2020, like everyone else did, but they didn't. Why is anyone's guess. Greed, skeletons in the closet, or whatever, doesn't really matter, they missed the boat
He did hand it off. Then he clawed his way back in amid the Ellen Pao stuff and it's generally been going downhill the whole time.