this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

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I'm devastated! Holy fuck it's the end of such a great resource. Is there any other plex share communities active at all?

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 1 year ago (4 children)

"Become profitable" is just their stated goal.

I think that their actual goal is to look profitable for the upcoming ipo so that the CEOs can cash a fat check and leave. They likely don't care about what happens after that.

So the "become profitable while simultaneously destroying everything that made it valuable" platitude is more like "they're cutting down the tree for the wood without thinking about the squirrels"

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But there are only so many Elon's that would buy a sinking ship for a shit ton of money.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the dumbest part. There's no guarantee that this ipo bid is going to pan out. Huffman is betting big, it's just too bad he's so full of himself that he doesn't realize his actions will probably be what causes this ipo to fail.

He wanted to fly under the radar and make changes that look good on paper while keeping the community relatively the same. Instead he made a splash so big that major news outlets are still talking about it months later, and now he's actively alienating the volunteer work that holds the whole site together.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Greed kills another thing, history of humankind.

[–] astral_avocado 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment but.. it's an IPO, they're going from private to public. Twitter was the opposite, which is unusual. Right now Steve Huffman is the musk of reddit.

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

They still need people to actually buy the shares of a sinking ship.

[–] astral_avocado 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's gonna be plenty of institutional investors and index funds who don't give a shit about drama that will buy it up regardless.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

For what? To lose money?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

the musk of Reddit

Sounds like Lynx Africa

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

But are investors this stupid? Who invests in an IPO without doing research on the company's activities? If they check the internet and it's countless articles about how their users and moderators are pissed and leaving, why would anyone think it's going to be profitable?

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

The sad thing is that reddit will probably do alright for at least a few years. It may not be an awful investment in the short term.

That said, it'll slowly burn out and investors will be left holding the bag. But that's alright, because Steve Huffman will have gotten his payday and retired to the decommissioned missile silo that he converted to luxury apartments in case of doomsday. All he had to do was fundamentally change the way people use the internet by selling the company that his two smart buddies created.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

by selling the company that his two smart buddies created.

Fucking preach.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yes. Look at the 2008 housing crash, and tell me average investors are intelligent.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

They definitely do, check out WSB and Robinhood subs

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Investors aren't great at seeing what makes or breaks a community. They just want to see how Reddit plans on profiting from the community.

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

Not necessarily, companies like Twitter make consistent losses with no real path to change that, yet its deemed to have value by investors.

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

It's more like "cutting down the forest to harvest the wood once" rather than "manage the harvesting so that it can be generating wood for generations". It's typical capitalism.