But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.
Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people.
I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.
What does Reddit's core functionality cost? They have annual revenue of half a billion dollars. Tell me that you can't use that money to run a text distribution infrastructure.
I doubt Slashdot in its day cost half a million dollars to run.
I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.
The fact that I subscribe to r/woodworking, r/diy, etc, is really useful for targeting but I never see relevant ads.
I’ve literally given Reddit a big list of my interests and the asked to be served content, and the ads are almost completely unrelated.
Good thing nobody is asking for that.
However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any changes.
Such a freq complaint it's a cliché.
Certainly been true for every software product and service I've worked.
The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got attacked and censored.
In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia calling for the deletion of his page.
After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor, it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Watching this whole experience play out in real time was utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since become captured.
Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership did not clamp down on this behavior when it was happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks from the far right and eventually people with a lot of exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half the country not trusting the site at all and their minds being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.
Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later after the election was over but the lasting damage has been done. I presume that in the next election it will be targeted again.
We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit during election season and you can be sure that Musk is whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place of refuge. I guess not.
Back in the day (2006-2010ish, I think) I was a pretty active member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians. I was kind of on a crusade against people who would put up their own pages to try to promote themselves, in violation of the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy. Mainly, I was worried that it would be untenable to keep WP accurate if we had too many pages. I also went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of. There was a well-established consensus at the time that most individual pokemon did not meet the notability threshold (I don't remember the exact criteria, but it had to do with multiple sources of the information being available) and therefore their pages should be deleted. Looking back, that was kinda silly... The Wikipedia is not Paper policy probably outweighs the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy when it comes to Pokemon.
Anyway, I don't doubt that there is a political element in the case of this Kyle guy, but it's probable that I would have voted to have him deleted on completely apolitical grounds. (I haven't heard of him and haven't read enough to form a political or notability opinion on him at this point)
I find it amusing that pokemons get pages, but real people don't.
Yeah, notability, I get it. Still.
This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by "intangible as well as tangible things" which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which at the same time are recognized as the tangible par excellence.
"""
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
And of course, giving back to Debord, we can say that the society of the spectacle is one of infinite supply of manufactured social objects.
"sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".
Anyway, the problem is there's a lot of valuable content on wikipedia that is essentially borderline according to the rules, but also delivers a lot of value, and this content exists at the suffrage of whether or not they have some greasy nerd as patron or whether another one gets a bee up their ass about it.
"Lists" policy is a great example, and I've seen quite a few important lists go through cycles where despite being a de-facto resource for 10 or 15 years, all of a sudden some editor will get a bee up their ass and just delete it all, because WP:Lists and WP:OriginalResearch. But of course having been the resource for 15 years, nobody external has bothered to collate a list that already exists on wikipedia, so we just lose that information unless some other greasy nerd pushes back on it.
The wikipedia editor cadre sucks, it's the definitive answer to the question of "what's the absolute least power that can go to someone's head". It's a real problem with the public trying to interact with wikipedia, much like stackoverflow answers everyone just knows it's not worth the time and does their damndest not to interact with it if they have any other alternatives.
And yes, "anyone can do it" in principle but it's not the public's job to push uphill to try and chase out bad actors in the organization. People won't do it and they'll just go do better things and you'll be left with a bioconcentrated poison - it's the "dead sea effect" in action. A sufficient concentration of poison will kill any life that might have any chance of remediating the poison.
Just in case anyone here is taking paulmd too literally, it's not possible for "some editor" or any one person to cause an article or list on WP to be deleted. If I remember correctly (and if it hasn't changed) speedy deletion requires at least 3 people, and if it's contested then there's a whole voting procedure. Speaking as a (former?) greasy nerd, I've actually always been impressed with the democracy and consensus systems on Wikipedia; it strikes me as pretty effective, especially compared to most governments.
You're probably right that self-aggrandizement and gatekeeping is a problem among wikipedians.
I'm sorry to hear the diagnosis is terminal... but since you say you've been complaining for at least 5 years, maybe WP has a few more years to live?
(anybody curious about how deletion works, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction_to_dele... )
Well, that's the point of the stackoverflow comparison. Nobody actually goes to stackoverflow to ask questions anymore. The culture is rotten and there are better places to ask. It's become "read-only" for most of its potential userbase, people actively avoid using it. But is there still a site called stackoverflow? Yes. It's just lingering in agony, like many cancer patients. Doesn't mean without some turn in fortunes (or leadership) that it's ever going to come back though.
> Did you try proposing a policy change
That's the thing I said though... why would I voluntarily choose to spend more time working with a toxic organization in a fruitless attempt to solve its organizational culture for them? Not only is that not actually going to change anything but it's a huge drain on me personally for little direct benefit. Why is it my responsibility to tilt at windmills to try and fix your organizational culture?
That's the whole point about StackOverflow and Wikipedia's culture problems in a nutshell: at a certain point you are just so toxic that nobody who's not interested in the game-playing itself is going to tolerate the game-playing. And at that point you have the "dead-sea effect" going, because the game-players will always stay around.
Is this a little unreasonable in the abstract? Sure, I am not engaging with the organization and then complaining when it doesn't work the way I want it to. But this is the practical reality - the public isn't going to build a better Wikipedia organization just for the sake of it. If you have a viable organization then some of them will contribute content, maybe. And if your editors piss it all away because it didn't meet X rule or Y rule then you will simply have a worse product, and in the long term people will stop contributing content because they see it doesn't matter (which is where we are with wikipedia right now in general).
I am not being prescriptive here - merely remarking on a phenomenon that is observable. Nobody likes interacting with StackOverflowers or Wikipedians. They're, on the whole, kinda shitty people, and the product is worse as a result of this public disengagement. And this is not an uncommon opinion, you will not find a single person on Reddit who speaks positively of StackOverflow or Wikipedia's organizational culture, everyone (including their CEOs) knows they suck to interact with. The culture is toxic and rotten and the organizations cannot change it because a subset of the members relish in it being toxic and rotten, and over time the projects lose steam and falter due to public disengagement. You'll always have the greasies but the public is not beating down SO's door in 2023 to enlarge the community or to edit wikipedia and create content they know will be reverted by some basement-dweller.
https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9
Anything beyond fixing a minor typo or awkward sentence is a waste of time on wikipedia, and that's really more than most people will even do to begin with. Just not interested in the social-game-playing aspects of it, and the content you create will be reverted and removed without you being an advocate for it. The gameplaying matters more than the content, and that's what's killing SO too.
But yeah, it's the paradox of intolerance in action. Being tolerant of shitty people leads to a shitty org culture or a shitty society/world. If they get too entrenched, you end up being unable to pry them off the levers of power and the dead-sea effect begins.
If it were just me, I'd keep my mouth shut (ok maybe not). Everyone knows SO and Wikipedia have culture problems. There's just also not really a way for them to move past them because the people causing those problems are powerful internal stakeholders. There's no easy solution to a rotten organizational culture and it leads to bad outcomes. It's a shame to see it happen but again, there's no magic wands to fix any of it. Whatcha gonna do.
I've had projects fail because of org culture problems (may have taken down the whole company at this point). But when the boss and the boss's boss are part of the problem, what can you realistically do? Not interact with that org anymore, that's about it.
Was it probably? I took a quick look at the deletions, the deletion reviews, and some of the older versions of the article. The article seemed to be very thin on actual citations, with way more text for a living-persons biography than I'd think reasonable for that level of sourcing. The deletion discussions were a hot mess, but my main takeway is what somebody else wrote there: "There's still not a single keep !voter here who has discussed which sources actually show notability."
Looking at the current article, my take is similar. I only skimmed, but I'm not seeing a lot of WP:RS compliant sources listed that would persuade me of notability even now; it's an awful lot of citation to his own works.
No need for such verbal contortion.
You're describing the far-right (Republican Party) and center-right (Democratic Party).
Left parties in the USA include Green Party, DSA, CPUSA, etc. They are largely irrelevant.
However, it doesn't have to be limited to legislations passed, but rather what is widely being discussed and pushed forward by the Democratic factions, the biggest example is the "Green New Deal"; more government intervention, increased spendings, massive expansion of state power.
US Senate and the solid blue core? Still firmly center-right.
For instance, Republicans are very unlikely to be elected in my city. So competitive candidates call themselves Democrats. And to establish their bonafidas, they might even hold a few select leftish positions to brag about. But when it comes to legislating and appropriations, the boring stuff that no one pays attention to, they're just as nimby, reactionary, regressive as any generic Republican.
Who are the likes? How many of them are there? AOC is a house representative; is there a progressive senator?
Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism? Reddit is pining to go public and Twitter just LBO'd. Neither is having its chain yanked by venture capital.
Took. Past tense. Limited need to take more. Look at Reddit's Board: it's ten people, only one of whom (Mike Seibel) is a VC.
No, they can ignore the venture capitalists' shares. Reddit's Series F was led by a mutual fund. Most of Reddit's shares are non-voting common stock, under a voting-rights agreement or held by non-VC investors.
The difference is meaningful when tracing incentives. Venture capital, almost by definition, involves a high-loss high-reward portfolio. Most bets are expected to bust. That makes a middling bet that doesn't return the fund essentially worthless, which in turn encourages shooting for the moon. Late-stage private portfolios cannot sustain heavy losses. They are looking at preservation of capital in addition to returns, which makes them fundamentally different from VCs.
Shorthanding all investors in tech companies to VCs denies you visibility into a rich spectrum of actors, incentives and alignments.
Most of Reddit's shares were issued in the era of founder-friendly voting rights agreements. The fact that those investors don't have anyone on the Board means they don't have the right to elect one to it. Private-company Board rules are Byzantine. But they're not thoughtless.
No. It's a term specific for those investors working with: I don't expect you to survive, but if you don't get at least 10000% of return, you could as well be dead.
Almost all of capitalism works differently.
Well, not anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
Thing is, Twitter was profitable in 2019. Then the venture capitalists decided "Now is the time to increase your workforce by a factor of two. You need to start losing money again or you aren't trying hard enough!"
You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot.
Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same.
You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.
Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine?
As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million.
I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear.
The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.
If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.
Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.
You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact.
People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize.
It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact.
Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".
So they got investment and scaled up to everyday users. Terrible redesign but at least the site doesn't look nerdy anymore, right? There are now actual advertisers on board. People are paying for badges and hats. They are tracking the shit out of people and pushing the app. They're on the way to profitability, and the next step is to cut out the old guard - who they couldn't monetize anyway - by removing third party apps.
Their costs are almost certainly ridiculous but their plan is either to become the next TikTok or crash and burn.
Cynically, nobody is going to donate to a full or nearly full "donations requested" bar, so nobody is going to specify a bar that gets full.
I'd rather contribute to something that is actually going to be successful.
If you say you need £1000000 to go to space, and ask for £10 sponsorship, if you tell me you've so far raised nothing, what chance is there of my money going to use as intended? If on the other hand you've raised £999000 I can be more confident you are actually going to reach your goal.
Also personally, it seems to me that if you have a goal, then that's a minimum. If you don't reach it, the thing doesn't happen. A website never reaching its funding goals is one that seems more likely to shut down, and what's the point of supporting something that could shut down tomorrow because it can't pay it's way. I know that's self reinforcing but there it is.
Income is the same as profit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260066/reddit-advertisi...
Shareholders care not for employee happiness, in so far as said employee is working and producing. Ditto with user happiness - if they're not happy they can leave. By not leaving, they must be happy to stay.
I think these proposals to "change" the metrics is as flawed as the current system.
The only way to avoid that I know is to address a specific target audience and scale up to dominate that. Tumblr has achieved this. A rival then can't dislodge you because you already own the relevant network. It's still risky though, because if a rival builds a product that covers the general audience and also servers that subset well, then the subset might decamp. Hence Tumblr trying to break out of it's niche. G+ addressed a lot of niches very well, but Google just wasn't interested in that kind of network.
Facebook is astoundingly profitable, and is the canonical example of network effects. Almost everyone I've ever known is or was on Facebook.
So I don't consider Network Effect Businesses to be terrible as for-profits in and of themselves.
The issue perhaps is that there is an expectation that they can become Google or Facebook.
Now we have a generation raised on social media that doesn't require your real name, maybe we will see a new platform reach Facebook levels.
TikTok and YouTube are obviously huge, but slightly different again to Facebook.
As an aside, people talk about how amazing Tik Tok is, but in the end, it's really just the creators uploading content that make it work.
Facebook captured Advertising dollars, in part, by investing in Ad infrastructure and building tools that companies could use to create targeted Ads. Every other platform, apart from AdWords, felt unfinished, especially Twitter!
Unfortunately any platform that draws >10 million daily users will reliably have people calling and offering billions of dollars to adopt that strategy and chase after revenue growth. Eventually the owner breaks down and agrees to take a huge personal payoff in order for the company to adopt a "Double or nothing" policy. Over, and over again.
There's too many enormous piles of money out there seeking a return for this to be a sensible self-regulating system with stable provision of goods & services.
Holdouts are few and far between, like Craigslist.
All of the BigTech companies are built on network effects and two sided markets
I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.
On the other hand there are sites like Danbooru which seem to thrive without advertising probably because the nature of their content drives advertising away.
I know that is a minefield of issues regarding access and moderation and it would make it a frequent election day financial harassment target but it would be nice to have something that is publicly funded, ad free, and not vulnerable to deep pockets stealing the entire system from the people.
Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud with Google means they may soon lose significant trust and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.
And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it; he's been covering it pretty well.
Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs, are still around (despite being compositionally a different population, mostly).
Sure, if you like cat mutilation and transphobia and white supremacist propoganda. But you be you.
It's not illegal either.
And then someone gave a valid response.
And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."
This response is a non-sequitor.
Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.
And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.
The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.
As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.
The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.
So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.
It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.
> When you call the police
In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.
People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.
To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.
It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.
There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.
Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.
After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.
Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.
Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.
That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.
But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.
For the average user who enjoys free speech more than not, Twitter is better now.
You're wrong about the "average user" enjoying "free speech", of course. That's the view Twitter started out on, "the free speech wing of the free speech party". But they learned that certain kinds of speech drove away users and made it hard to sell ads, so for very good business reasons, they decided to take away the "free speech" of people to, say, shout the n-word at black people. [1]
I believe you enjoy it more, of course. But other people enjoy it less. You and Musk are making the same mistake in thinking a thing that you like is a thing that everybody will like. Running a social network means you have to create something that is liked by a very wide variety of people. And a lot of people who wave the "free speech" banner just turn out to want no constraints on their own speech, while having much less concern about creating a place where a wide variety of people can safely speak up and be heard.
[1] Something that surged under Musk's new "free speech" regime. e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/tech/twitter-hate-speech/inde...
I don't recall it being truly necessary before, though there were annoying banners sometimes.
But right now "age restricted" tweets require a login, and the thing that makes tweets age restricted is the presence of images plus a very buggy per-account setting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...
Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.
There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.
> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.
I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.
She can search YouTube for cats and not get that stuff.
But I frequently think of my kids even for situations they don't directly risk. Call it an empathy gauge.
We also didn't have the massive amount of statistical evidence in mental health that came to light just recently about teenage social media use, especially in girls. Several times these studies have made it to the top of HN.
https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...
Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?
Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.
Anecdotally, due to Musk's support of extreme-right views (for example re-inviting Trump [2], supporting DeSantis [3], or protecting bullying [4]), many people have left in protest and so these views are over-represented on the site.
The word "decay" seems appropriate.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-trump-r... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitte...
His overall summary was that he saved Twitter by firing unnecessary staff.
Everyone in Silicon Valley screeched that this was an evil move by an evil person, and that Twitter would immediately crash and burn without all those thousands of infinitely valuable developers and IT admins.
That was in October 2022, nearly 8 months ago. Twitter is still up, and hasn't imploded.
As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.
Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)
Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.
Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.
Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution to that isn't to remove the feature. There are many other ways to deal with that, including banning the people who enjoy fomenting mob abuse campaigns.
I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.
The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is a solid case study from recent times.
https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-business-f...
Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.
Good for you and Musk! So proud of people who can put money into something and lord over it because of capitalism.
TBC: you thought the throughline was money when it was nothing. You were talking about investing money that can be used to exploit workers and turn a higher profit by paying workers less than they benefit the stakeholders. Exploiting people is an obvious immoral action.
One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable.
A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable.
Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.
As a small business owner myself, I can very much assure you that we're not thinking of that at all; we're thinking of ways to get back into the black!
Once we're in the black, we'll start thinking of ways to get an early retirement.
For nearly 20 years I helped run Bandwagon, a co-op of nerds who toward the end of the dot-com bubble needed a place to put their personal web projects. We clubbed together to rent a full colo rack and we each put our servers in.
There were many opportunities to try to turn this into a business. It might have been lucrative, might have been a failure. We kept it as a small co-op, and it was fine.
And right now I'm looking at starting something that I might eventually get a salary from, but if it has surplus revenues beyond that, I'd rather use it to improve the thing and its impact in the world.
I understand that a lot of people want a zillion dollars so they can live a life of luxury. To each their own, but I feel kinda bad for people who organize their lives around that. They rarely succeed, are usually quite unhappy, and frequently create a trail of pain and misery behind them.
Trying to make a massive profit is another activity altogether, and the quest to do so can easily destroy a sustainable business. As Reddit may learn.
> Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability.
The head count increased ten fold since Spez took over. This is because VCs want billion dollar companies, not some moderately profitable ones. They want to deliver more (so more employees) and increase monetization, including by charging for the API.
If they stayed smaller it would have been more sustainable and wouldn't have to charge for the API.
He’s chasing new markets, not doubling down on current ones. to the detriment of everyone including his companies profitability.
Congratulations Reddit! You pulled in users with no good way to cover the costs of those users.
[0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC
Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit).
Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.
If they tell you to implement a banner or dark pattern you do it.
This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who view themselves as painter artists. He explained the fundamental difference between his work and the work of a painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive landscape.
A stable environment can also allow people to build other art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.
In order for this to be Reddit's "Digg moment", there needs to be a viable candidate to switch to.
There isn't, as far as I can tell.
Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in.
The social media as a prison operating model.
That's probably NSFW.
HN and RSS remain in the mix. Also using my mobile browser's option to create a shortcut/browserApp for a few news sites. There really is an awful lot out there - I'm just beginning to look (again).
Interestingly... last year - with no effort on my part - reddit became an also-ran when I dived into TikTok. When I left TikTok, reddit re-entered the picture.
Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market.
Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views.
Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age.
Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.
But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.
Some of us have work related to politics and don’t need an ignorant explanation of the propaganda video called what is a woman (a title and question that is silly in and of itself…people know what a woman is).
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You don’t understand right or wrong. The person being incorrect about minor un important stuff bout some kids sometimes rarely getting more serious stuff happen doesn’t mean anything. We are still talking super rare stuff.
At no point do you, someone who is pretending watching a propaganda video gives them evidence for their side. A video can say anything haha. The amt of shady shit the porpoganda was doing was unhinged.
Stop repeating what your ilk does. Again the person being technically wrong does not matter. Any one who reconsiders positions based on only technically being wrong is by definition not fair minded enough. They are reactionaries without enough theory or knowledge to back up any convictions they have that are focused on unhinged things like focusing on oppressed people.
At no point do you understand what ideology means. To act like people who don’t want to see fascism as ideologues is unhinged.
Also. Did you know leftists get banned all the time. Leftist subreddits get banned In whole (Chapo Trap House).
Stop living in a fantasy world where you’re the moral victim.
See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.
There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence.
Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle)
If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.