If a business was actually losing money for 20 years straight then how does it continue to grow? Think about Amazon and how long it wasn’t profitable despite being one of the largest businesses ever in recorded history.

It’s a business scam that’s a legal way of pay significantly less taxes than they normally would.

How much is it worth for the power to push an agenda onto 850,000,000 people?

Any company that has no profit is worth nothing in an IPO.

I envy people with the bravery to speak passionately about something they don’t understand at all.

Unlikely. It’s in all likelihood just a bad business, like so many other VC-subsidised businesses that have come before them. Case in point: Uber, Airbnb, WeWork.

The whole game is to offer services at a loss for enough time to lock in customers, then raise the prices in the future.

Reddit has been a private company for its entire existence. There really isn’t a point in it making a profit, as long as the people running it are paying themselves.

But it isn’t gambling … It’s managed and calculated financing in companies that need the investment in order to grow

I’m kidding, this is sarcasm … the stock market is a freakin casino with built in cheats and frauds that favor the rich and wealthy.

The stock market, much like capitalism in general, is useful if regulated properly, but the inherent corrosive nature of human greed on any regulatory system will eventually erode those regulations down and let this shit run rampant. There are genuine benefits to it, but they’re buried beneath the sheer scale of wealth begetting more wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Part of it is that, to spite it being “gambling”, it sure doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of losing going on with the biggest players. They don’t seem to need to be as careful as you or I would need to be. It’d be one thing if it was fair gambling, but it isn’t.

Every decision made since before the first world war has been a mistake for humanity, from the way we deliver electricity to the way we run the economy to the way we run our education system. Just one big ball of mistakes coming right at ya, all with better alternatives available at the outset, all prejudicially rejected because you can’t make dragon-hoard piles of money those ways.

Pretty soon we’ll all die though, so there’s that.

it doesn’t make sense to put a gambling house in the core of the world economy.>

wise words

He’s going to take it all.

That’s not what they mean by “chronically online”

How are you parsing that quote? What do you think it means?

I still remember clicking a bunch of irrelevant ads for knives and other weird shit on a forum I visited regularly because the owner said they get slightly more money when ads get clicked on site.

I’m doing my part!

The “old internet” hasn’t gone away. It’s easier than ever for your average person to set up their own website. Look at all the shit you can do with WordPress, usually for free and usually with minimal technical knowledge or experience. Reddit/Facebook/Google/etc have done nothing at all to prevent people from doing that. The people still choose reddit/Facebook/google. I don’t know we’re supposed to change that without actually removing people’s freedom of choice.

There was a simple version of reddit that could be profitable without compromising what made it enjoyable for the users, but the suits had to go chasing after a bunch of fads (remember bow they tries to produce a series of video AMAs?).

I have no qualms with a person making a comfortable living off of building a website like Reddit. None at all. I’d rather have someone who’s able to dedicate their full time and even a team to making an experience great for users and making a very healthy living off of it.

But yea, spez is a greedy fuck and the ELT at Reddit are all greedy fucks. Reddit has no business being a publicly traded company.

What I’d really love to see more of is tech co-ops and unions.

With the current wave of corporate tech layoffs, I’m seriously surprised I’m not seeing more movement on the tech unions. Not so surprised I’m not seeing many co-ops since that business model is rarely used, but really should be invested into by more smaller tech shops. Additionally, unless you’re an AI startup or some other buzz-tech startup trying to grift the trend wave, the investor money has mostly dried up outside of a few people that have actual knowledge in the space and understand that there needs to be more diversity in the tech space or else innovation stifles.

Hollywood accounting tactics probably aswell

Not to be that guy, but I think he makes 300k and was given 193m in stock options last year based on some whack evaluation.

Still an utterly insane number, hope they get crushed on the public market

Imagine the absolute conflict of interest that is r/WSB

You keep telling the next investor it’ll be profitable soon. I believe the guy that came up with this scheme first went to prison or something, but afterwards we all collectively decided we were cool with it.

They’ve had investors who were willing to pay into a loss-making company. Could be that they sold investors on the idea that it will be profitable at some point in the future but it needs to be funded while it grows. Could also be that the value they see in it is not just financial - the ability to influence opinion, harvest data, stuff like that.

Why on earth would they give those sweet pre-IPO shares up to the unwashed masses if they thought there was even a remote chance the IPO would at least break even?

I suspect it’s because they’re worried that their users are going to short them and encourage others to do the same, so they’re trying to get them involved and committed. They don’t want WSB causing shit. My guess is that the share prices will do pretty well, at least initially. There are plenty of ignorant investors who want to get in on the next big tech stock. Just a guess though, I don’t know enough about this stuff to invest in stocks myself.

People talk about Reddit and AI in terms of what Reddit will do for those LLMs. But I imagine another part of it has to be what they’ll do for Reddit. Like redditors volunteer sooo much information that it’s really an advertises dream if you can start to thread it together.

I feel like the average Reddit user is more likely to be running Adblock than the average Facebook user.

Reddit knows who you really are, but facebook knows who you want to look like you are.

I’d think you’re much more likely to click ads based on the latter.

Next is that pesky porn problem that makes up most of the traffic.