Mark Hanna: Number one rule of Wall Street. Nobody - and I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or if you're Jimmy Buffet - nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles. You know what a fugazi is?
Jordan Belfort: Fugayzi, it's a fake.
Mark Hanna: Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real.
If you buy a house with a loan and pay it back, you haven't turned a profit either - but you do now own a house that has a theoretical value. That's basically how these things work, investing everything on growing the company in the hopes that some day what they have built can start creating profit, or be sold to someone who thinks they can.
I get that, but who would want to buy a company that's never been profitable? It smacks of a scam. "Hey, bro! Buy my company! It never managed to make any money for me, but it'll be highly profitable for you!" Sounds like the company founder is looking to pull a fast one and laugh all the way to the bank while their investor is left holding the bag.
The only way I can see this working is if the idea is to build a large user base by offering a good user experience, i.e. not monetizing the platform very much, just enough so that it barely pays for its own operating costs. Then you sell that user base to someone else for the express purpose of shoving tons of ads down everyone's throat. In that case it's still a fast one, only in this scenario the users are the victims. But even then I'm skeptical. If that's the plan, why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?
why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?
Because it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself - as we are currently seeing with how wonderfully incompetent Spez is with Reddit.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013 - only to sell it for $3 million in 2019 - was Tumblr bringing in millions and millions of profit? No. But Yahoo thought that they would be able to make it.
Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, it hasn't turned any profit either (and never will enough for him to get his moneys worth, but that's just because Musk is an idiot).
But yeah, quite often it does feel like a scam. Or kinda like... gambling? You hope someone will pay a lot for your company, while they hope they can make it turn wildly profitable, both may or may not come true.
A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under. It’s not about making profit. Companies don’t have value outside of making a profit. Now that I type that I see they actually can have value. Such as political sway or if it’s a company that has some value beyond money, like education or taking care of the needy. But you’d have to find someone willing to sink money into them simply because they find value beyond money.
A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under
But that doesn't mean you can turn a profit from it, or even break even. If you want to do that you have to sell it to someone, and there are multiple reasons why you might not be able to - maybe you spent too much money renovating it and now nobody wants to pay that much. Maybe a bunch of new housing was built and the value crashed. Maybe Detroit happened and the location and land it sits in is literally worthless and nobody wants to live there. - until you actually find a buyer for it all houses have only a theoretical value, as do all companies.
Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.
As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.
So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.
The issue is that you don't have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can't even build your lemonade stand.
Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.
So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you're making from the lemonade.
That's OK for me, though. I wasn't doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it's finished, I'm fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.
So everything is tugging along and now you're actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you've always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don't actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.
Currently, your company haven't made a single cent, but that's fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.
Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.
So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.
Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can't actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company's value plummets and eventually closes down.
Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn't make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You're also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.
It’s almost like loudly announcing contempt for your userbase is not good for a website where virtually 100% of their value is derived from the loyalty of their users
Rains Bran is the only one I still buy sometimes. I prefer to cook my breakfast but it’s great for when I’m stoned in the middle of the night and want something to snack on.
Honestly I don’t know anymore. It used to be Cookie Crisp but now that I’m older I’m realizing it’s kinda mid. But idk what would replace Cookie Crisp in my life. I like Krave but it feels more like candy/snacks than food to me. I say I like Lucky Charms but what that really means is that I like the marshmallows, not the cereal itself. Cinnamon Toast Crunch is solid though, so maybe that.
If I could only pick one, probably cornpops. I have some s'mores cereal right now. It's basically just a mix of Golden Grahams, Cocopuffs, and Marshmallows, its great and is a strong contender.
Even that stuff is too sugary for me (Weetbix in NZ) so I just make my own cereal with blackjack and hookers whole oats , pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, chia etc. It's really good!
I’ve really been enjoying life cereal lately. A good crunch without going overboard, and a little bit of sweet to it. You have to eat 2 smaller bowls, though, or else it’ll be mush by the time you finish.
I don’t eat cereal that much these days, but I love the Golden Grams type cereal, whatever brand. Cinnamon Toast Crunch is solid second choice, tho. These days tho, I go with the more adult cereal… being a healthy adult is kinda lame sometimes.
I love Lucky Charms but unfortunately, they're not sold where I live. The sugar content is probably above the official EU limit for cereals or something :(
Definitely delicious, I love that cereal. I also started getting into Cinnamon Cheerios Crunch or whatever it’s called. really tasty. I guess I just love cinnamon.
I don't know why, but whenever my blood sugar is low (I'm a t1 diabetic) I crave Rice Krispies so much. It's now my favorite cereal even when I'm not low.
Every once in a while I catch that off-brand Fruity Pebbles (Fruity Dino-Bites!) with marshmallows in it. Just blend that shit up and shoot it directly into my fucking veins please.
Weetabix, that soggy cardboard taste in your mouth in the morning isn't there to enjoy, it's to make you feel like you're doing something good and healthy for your body. No more than 2!
I don't eat cereal anymore, or when I do it's the non-sugary healthy kind. But among all of them it's really difficult, but I think I like Captn Crunch with berries. But it really depends on what I would be craving for I!
I usually criticize these journalists for being a step or two behind the actual news with regards to social media movements. In this case though, at least they clearly state they are simply reviewing the past events.
As a result of that one little disclaimer line, this is actually a decent article and a reasonable bit of reporting. Even managed to be pretty impartial. 8/10.
@PenguinJuice Even if they were to back track on their decisions, they’ve shown us they can destroy it all just because they want to. The threadiverse will allow a bit more of checks and balances. I’m storing Reddit along with MySpace, in the hood memories I had there until the fire nation arrived.
Oh my gosh, I so hope they shot themselfes in the food, healed with an underlying infection, develop sepsis, recover from this and fetch mrsa in the hospital just to die from falling down the stairs.
It's a lot like Twitter. Twitter was doing alright prior to Musk. Their user base was as strong and plentiful as ever. There have always been shitty users and toxic corners but Twitter did their best to downplay that and highlight the better parts of their platform. They did their best to walk that fine line between moderation and censorship.
But with Musk spending $44bn so that he could meme without consequence and restore accounts of politically powerful people to gain favor, along with him gutting all of the departments that did the moderation, the site has gone from a legitimate place to interact to a well known cesspool of toxicity that users and corporations are starting to shy away from. Turns out that getting rid of moderators might not be such a good idea.
There are still a great many users on Twitter who are actively participating and that won't change anytime soon. But the ratio of good content to bad has changed and Twitter's reputation both as a company and as a platform has been tarnished. Twitter isn't going anywhere, but many people have grown weary of the antics and moved on. And that's what we're seeing of reddit right now. The only difference is the simultaneous mass, organized exodus of users from reddit vs the more gradual enshitification of Twitter.
The fact that Relay can stay free of charge while "exploring subscription options" means Reddit modified their terms with some developers. The original deal announced at the end of May meant devs would incur charges starting July 1, although they wouldn't have to pay for those charges until August. That would mean racking up potentially millions in costs right away.
Reddit said they would work with developers who kept communication open, but then they wouldn't answer emails. If a deal was made with Relay it would have been very last minute and therefore rather unprofessional.
I used Relay but will not reinstall because it is temporarily free. I am done with Reddit. They don't respect their users or recognize where their value derives from.
I also suspect that there were inconsistencies between pricing based on the 3rd party app in question. I don't mean that Apollo was being charged more (in proportion) for having a larger userbase compared to apps like Relay or narwhal, but that Apollo was being charged almost double per unit to access API than Relay or narwhal. I am reading between the lines of articles published two *weeks ago about this because it didn't make sense to me why these smaller apps would be able to afford the business model if Apollo had a $20M bill to pay in August.
What gets my goat is why didn't reddit ever just headhunt Christian or other 3PA developers and bring them into reddit corporate to build out their native app? That's what Google or Microsoft would have done to quash competition. Or, to be truly evil, hired Christian and then never let him work on apps again with both an NDA and a non-compete in place.
Huffman regularly calls reddit unprofitable with a heavy dose of ire, but I think there could have been a way to bring a reputable 3PA dev into the fold to keep the reddit native app at least comparable in UX.
They DID do that, when they bought Alien Blue. Then they promptly destroyed it. Good UX != profits. So they butchered it into some sort of zombie app where everything was designed to make them money. And that’s why they are pushing so hard to make EVERYONE use it.
If anything, they hate 3PA devs because they show users what the experience could be like - how good and clean it could be - if they didn’t have a greedy corporation trying to sabotage everything.
They don’t need to hire anyone to pacify them. Reddit doesn’t gaf what happens to the devs, whether they are pacified or not. It’s like a tiny baby fish cursing the ship that just harvested 120,000 fish in a net. The ship laughs, and sails away.
Hopefully things will be better once federation grows in popularity. I know I’ve been using it daily since this all started. But sadly I have to augment with reddit because there just aren’t enough people here yet.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted.
I’ve noticed this too. Almost all of the subs I regularly go to have been filled by obvious “seed”-content posting by brand new and never before seen in the sub accounts, with upvotes equaling some of the highest voted (for the sub). It actually pushed me to migrate to Lemmy more.
I’m really fascinated at how in the lead up to this they consistently alienated moderators and users so into reddit that they looked up 3PAs. Like they really went ham on the users that make their site work and go all shocked pikachu when people leave/disengage/protest. That’s a level of social incompetence I can’t conceptualise when the stakes are this high.
Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn't think bestof communities were lame.
As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.
I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.
Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo's carapace?
Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.
So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn't arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn't have to think about reddit's corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.
This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn't have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I'm on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I've since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian's mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.
You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?
I think what pisses me off the most is that no matter what happens, Spez will somehow walk away with enough of that sweet, sweet CEO money to fund my life several generations over and will probably get another sweet, sweet CEO position somewhere else to destroy another company because he’s got “experience”.
Reddit, reddit is on fire we don’t need no water, let that mother fucker burn, burn mother fucker. Now when we came out, we told you it was just about 3pa bad treatments, Then spez had to send internal letter with his motherfuckin' opinion about how futile the blackout is. Well this is how we gon' do this
Fuck spez, fuck reddit admins
Fuck any mods that are not protesting ,
And if you want to be down with reddit API decision , then fuck you too.
I don't see how this works in the long run, if they have to put paid corporate drones in charge of moderation. Wasn't the entire point of Reddit that they don't have to pay moderators?
This kind of strategy is lose / lose. If spez want an IPO, well this kind of crap is tanking that IPO.
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