• Ɀeus@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    somebody else pointed this out, but it’s honestly bizarre he’s going in on the “we aren’t making any money” ploy in preparation for the ipo

    what’s the pitch to the investors? “please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase”?

    • TeaHands@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      “We’re not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds.”

      • branchial@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.

        Cats -> 🥰 News -> 🤔 Injustice -> 😡 Helping others -> 🤗 Cool gadgets -> 🤯

        No thinking just liking

        • generalpotato@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          This is exactly why I don’t like traditional social media. Doom scrolling + validation fishing + content designed to illicit a response (good or bad), is a no for me fam. Reddit desperately wants to be one of those, and it’s clear as day, and for that reason, I’m out.

    • heimur@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      In Reddit’s defense (I’m team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable. It’s weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he’s had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it’s clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.

      • RaoulDuke@lemmy.nz
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        2 years ago

        Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would’ve made more off those users than if they’d moved to the official app.

        Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.

        • Banzai51@midwest.social
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          2 years ago

          The reason Reddit doesn’t want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.

          • taj@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            Yup. I get it too. ‘We’ll lock down and get rid of the 3rd party apps, just give us a couple of months.’

      • PierreKanazawa@fedia.io
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        2 years ago

        I’m also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.

        • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.one
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          2 years ago

          I don’t understand why the Fediverse doesn’t adopt peer to peer Popular tabs. That’s the only benefit that a centralized server has, is to let people know what is collectively being talked about.

          Imagine one big list that refreshes every so often that is stored locally on instances, and it just aggregates and sorts what’s getting traffic across all instances.

          Obviously it could be opt in and moderated by instance via blacklists and whitelists.

          Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if its federated or not

          • jsqribe@lemmy.j-cloud.uk
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            2 years ago

            This would be very good for Lemmy, I’ve just started an instance and trying to find content from all the federated servers can be a bit of a pain…

    • MachineTeaching@feddit.de
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      2 years ago

      It’s not actually about the money in that sense. Don’t be fooled.

      No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That’s the real investor pitch, they just aren’t saying it out loud.

      If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?

      If it’s about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can’t possibly be met? Why don’t they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?

      They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can’t pay.

      • Lemming@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        That’s the reason why I edited all my posts/comments and deleted them afterwards. Also requested all my data with a GDPR form, will also request deletion it they don’t budge

    • chrundle@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I thought companies going into an IPO are often unprofitable/losing money, but still attract investments in the hope of future profits.