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
Welcome to the fediverse friend. Might take a week or two to figure out, and the bugs are still being sorted, but boy is it a nice change of scenery. And once the apps come it'll feel like home again.
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.
@Kill_joy I'm just waiting for my data export to come through (it's been over a week since I requested it), then I'll submit a GDPR deletion request – any other way of deleting only hides the data from the web, but it remains in their databases.
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I for one welcome our intolerant of intolerance server admins across the fediverse.
I get why you're posting this comic and I contextually agree with you. However, the comic itself is bad, and it distorts quite a bit what Popper said.
The quote in the Wikipedia link that you've shared is considerably better:
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Sorry, but what comic are you referring to? Some other users also referenced panels of a comic, but I don’t see any comic—or any link other than to Wikipedia.
Either it was edited in and that edit didn't reach your instance, or Lemmy doesn't like something about how Kbin does images. Either way, here's a direct link to the comic (you'll have seen it before, it's posted a lot).
Annoyingly, I can’t view the post from its own instance because it seems like Kbin requires an account even to view?
Would love if someone has a Lemmy link to any instance other than mine so I can rule out that first possibility.
or Lemmy doesn’t like something about how Kbin does images
This is definitely very possible. I’ve already encountered cases where Kbin users weren’t able to interact with my images from Lemmy in quite the same way Lemmy users could.
Interesting that the image doesn’t show up embedded even in another Kbin instance. @Otome-chan you seemed to have some knowledge, do you know what’s up?
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