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.
Anything involving user interaction, besides subscribing/unsubscribing from a magazine is on hold until the API is released and I can implement it. It's a glorified lurker app currently.
I really love Tildes, but the comments in this thread are fair enough criticisms, and pretty accurate.
The only thing I'd clarify in the comments here is that there's not really a "waiting list" for invites. Deimos accepts emails requesting invites, and people receive access as he responds to each email. Users also get 5 invites every few weeks, so you can ask people for one here or on /r/redditalternatives. Or in the invite threads that are posted in /r/tildes. And the invite system isn't used to make it feel "exclusive" (especially since it's pretty easy to get one,) it's used because the site has been around for years with an existing userbase, so there's an effort to gradually add users to Tildes so the site doesn't just turn into 99% disgruntled redditors.
Tildes simply doesn't have the goals of "reddit alternatives" that are hoping to launch a new, popular site. It's just doing its own thing. Personally I find it refreshing, but it's definitely not for people who want to be part of the next "reddit" with millions of other people.
Actually, since you all aren't being assholes about your criticisms of it, this gives me a good feeling about kbin. I was going to try this site as an alternative before I found Tildes and have been spending most of my time there, but I'll probably hang around here eventually, for content that doesn't belong on Tildes (image posts, memes, and other silly stuff.)
Tildes simply doesn't have the goals of "reddit alternatives" that are hoping to launch a new, popular site. It's just doing its own thing. Personally I find it refreshing, but it's definitely not for people who want to be part of the next "reddit" with millions of other people.
Sure, I definitely respect that and it is one of the things I like about it. I like the way it's focused on conversations over cut n paste memes.
But I think I've found a similar experience here on Kbin by blocking meme heavy groups and joining more specific communities. I'm still going to check out Tildes every now and then though
Why pretend we never measure value in things other than money? It's obviously a loss to the user experience for those who haven't moved to offer sites, and a loss to the knowledge base that users had built there. I think you know that's what's being discussed here, yet you're only countering from reddit's productive of what would constitute a loss... for some unimaginable reason.
The unimaginable reason is that the OP, which I replied to, claimed they couldn’t replace all mods. My counter point was that they don’t care about replacing them for small communities, because that’s not what makes them money. Hopefully I’ve broadened your imagination.
That’s part of what made reddit interesting tho. Having these niche subs that still had a reasonable amount of activity. If they loose that this is the one thing they had over lemmy for me personally. I’ve never been particularly attached to say r/pics but r/aspiememes was the bees knees. They are coming to lemmy by now.
Yup. But then that another reason for users to leave reddit behind. Which should interest reddit. But it’s been clear for a while they can’t even act in their own best interest.
Publicly traded companies by their very nature have to prefer short term profits. It’s no surprise that Reddit does the same in preparation for going public.
If Reddit think small.communities are worthless then they really dont understand social media. Lots of users belong to big and small communities. I left Reddit because the small communities I engaged with are gone.
I'm not drawn back by the big generic communities - they've lost me from both. Multiple that up everytime a small community has fallen apart with a proportion of its users are gone for good, and you have a real problem.
It's all part of the same enshittification. Reddit is dying through death by a thousand cuts.
They care about people seeing ads. And that’s it. I agree with you that Reddit is dying (very slowly), but there are millions of dollars to be milked before the platform is fully dead. And for everyone like you and me, there are thousands who are there for the generic communities. Most people on Reddit don’t post or comment, those don’t strike me as someone who would enjoy being part of the niche communities.
Yes, at this point, there is really no fucking saving it or hoping for changes, they will go as far as they need to go to get their profits back up. It must be abandoned. The only time I ever spend on reddit is to convince people to migrate to kbin or lemmy (nicely, dont be annoying)
I find that a large majority of redditors are still somehow completely clueless about what’s happening.
So I made this little formatted summary of events inviting confused redditors to lemmy/kbin if anyone wants to copy/paste; seems to get people to understand.
What really worked for me was the https://sub.rehab website. When I found that, it made me realize I need to stick with the people who actually built the subs I love -- the mods. Here I am.
Yeah. The unethical bots will just use scrapers, as they already do for the many websites that don't offer APIs. They're already violating ToS, so they don't care. Ethical ones won't have that option (at least not past the fairly low quota).
The only good that can truly come of this at this stage is sabotaging Huffman's hopes of cashing out for a second time, after he sold his stake for a ""mere"" 10 million back in the day.
Imagine having more money than anyone can spend in a lifetime and users who create the content for you. All you have to do is sit on your ass and do and say nothing, but then imagine what a pants-on-head stupid fool you’d have to be to do anything to mess that up, to let your ego totally disrupt the sweet deal you’ve got going. That’s Steve Huffman – the king of all losers.
i tried to move my 100k subscriber sub to kbin (i also offered two different chatrooms)
6 came to kbin and people started attacking me for having the sub closed (one person even resorted to transphobia like jesus fucking christ) and being "political" and one person even made their own version of my subreddit
moving is too much work (it's actually not that much work, but since we now need two videos playing at the same time and can only watch those vids for 30 seconds, everything is "too much work"). that's why people are still on facebook, twitter, instagram, and tiktok.
i'm very glad there's an acceptable amount of activity on the "threadiverse" right now... but i just don't have hope that everyone will leave.
This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.
In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.
not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon
This is the reason I'm still using Twitter. I use Twitter not to tweet about what I did, but to get news from people I follow.
Tech people can move to Mastodon because their circles are moving, but not with common people.
For me, personally, Mastodon is like empty void. No one to follow and I can't interact with people who share same interests because they only exist on Twitter (since the "famous people" isn't moving from Twitter)
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