this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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"?

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"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."

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

Cats -> πŸ₯° News -> πŸ€” Injustice -> 😑 Helping others -> πŸ€— Cool gadgets -> 🀯

No thinking just liking

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Ahh, the Disney Star Wars tactic.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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.'

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They still have and will sell all the user data.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Something like that!