You can find plenty of other sources just like that one saying the same thing. I’m pretty sick of this myth, because it gives all these companies a bogeyman to hide behind.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn't deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders, and after announcing his plans to purchase Twitter for the inflated price Elon couldn't back out due to the same threat however I am open to the idea that I could of been misled on that situation.
As for the why of a myth like that circulating I doubt its due to malice and more due to misunderstanding as Ive always understood that any wording made on a legal case could be used as precedent. It could also fit well with people rationalizing why companies seek record profits while underpaying workers for their labor.
If anyone could clarify the Twitter situation without sucking off elon it would be appreciated
The rule is that a corporation is primarily organized for the benefit of shareholders, but it's not exclusively organized for only that purpose, and the corporation has no obligation to maximize the benefit for shareholders today versus tomorrow, in cash versus in future equity, in certain profit versus uncertain risks, etc. So the company can choose to pay out dividends to shareholders, or reinvest profits back into the company. It can give money to charity to improve public goodwill, and it can give bonuses to non-shareholder employees to keep things running smoothly, and shareholders can't sue that their money is going to non-shareholders.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders,
The article actually talks about that specific scenario, in the Revlon case. If a company is going private and buying out its shareholders, then there's not an ongoing set of broad interests to balance. The shareholders are being forced to give up their shares in exchange for cash, so if that transaction is going to go through, the corporation has an obligation to maximize the price for those shareholders. There's no today versus tomorrow, dividend versus reinvestment, etc., because that one transaction distills everything down into money for shares.
With the Twitter case, it's a bit in between the two: were the Twitter shareholders better off between taking the cash for shares today, or declining the cash to keep the company and see if that is better for them in the long term? The directors were obligated to negotiate a deal and submit that deal to a shareholder vote. So if the shareholders decide "hey this is a good deal for us," then that pretty much simplifies the question into a clear answer, rather than a complicated set of countervailing interests of uncertain weight.
I didn't originally think that reddit shouldn't charge at all for API access, but after spez's recent interviews I wouldn't go back to the site without a promise that API access will be free forever. Is that reasonable? No, but fuck spez.
Reddit is under no obligation to make its API free. But, it seems, the company has overreached in enforcing the new policy. If its target is the largest AI firms, then it should focus on curbing their parasitic proclivities and not going after beloved and useful software its users and moderators depend on.
This is my feeling. I understand that it could cost something. But the eye-watering rates for the small fish and the speed of the extortion is the issue.
Because the point isn’t the costs of the API. Reddit wants all its users to go through the official access points, the Reddit app and the redesigned web. This will allow them to hover the maximum data to sell and ensure ads flow.
They should've just been effing upfront about it instead of trying to scapegoat API creators. Did they think users are too dense to understand what they were/are really up to?
Have corporations always been this dishonest and they're only know getting caught? Am I old enough to see when a corporation is lying, or are corporations blatantly lying more often now?
Think of it as killing two birds with one stone: they monetize users by getting AI firms to pay for all the valuable content redditors have posted over the years, and they kill off app competitors who are giving redditors alternatives to the mobile app.
Reddit knows the rates it proposed are extortionist. They don't have the nerve to honestly state that 3rd party access will be stopped from July 1 and accept responsibility, so instead they tried to find a way to blame 3rd parties.
agreed but i woudnt call it won just yet lets see what happens after the 3rd party apps stop working and people who may not have been paying attention get affected
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. In the long term we’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
Those are just users numbers, which didn't dip all that much even during the blackout. The doomscrollers will keep coming until it sucks.
Reddit still has hundreds of millions of active users per month. They may have lost some people, but this many eyeballs has a huge potential for profit.
No longer being viable as a business would be "lost", not "losing", if you ask me. We'll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
Only if you define mods winning as 'things go back to what they were'.
The CEO is only 'winning' in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.
His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His 'victory' will be pyrrhic at beast.
Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they're locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).
We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it's not ours. The space isn't in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.
Well, what's happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they'll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.
Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don't need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.
Huffman will still have most of Reddit's chickens, and that's why he thinks it's worth it. But the hens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who'll produce nothing for him other than noise.
Right now it looks like it's a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article's title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren't clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
There has already been a relatively large population that has left the site (myself included) in a short amount of time. I doubt the rate will stay that high, but even though, integrating over time I see this is as the beginning of the end for Reddit and spez. The guy is a greedy jackass and I hope he loses it all.
I think we're gonna see another huge blow to Reddit in a few days when all the third-party apps go permanently offline. I'll bet that a lot of people who haven't been paying attention so far are definitely going to start having something to say about it very soon.
This will be when the true test for Reddit begins; if the outcry is large enough that spez ends up relenting in some way then he will have already alienated a lot of users. If the outcry is minimal then I guess he won, but the prize hardly seems worth the drama that has been spun up.
It isn't going to be outcry, it is going to be drop in traffic. Spez is gambling that third party app users will switch to the official app. I won't, and I hope most others don't.
Maybe, I'm certainly in that camp. Once RIF stops working I'll stop using Reddit. I don't know that there are a lot of people like me though (and the ones that are are probably here already).
I've already stopped using reddit altogether on my phone. I moved Apollo off my homescreen.
And I still check reddit on desktop here and there, but that's mostly to check mod messages. And to see what that latest admins are threatening me with. I got 3 small subs that are private. And reddit doesn't like that.
It looks like it is going to be a pyrrhic victory for Spez. You're right in that we don't know the knock-on effects of this decision, including if Reddit can get long time users to jump to the official app and if moderators will continue volunteering time.
I suspect a lot of subs are now going to create contingency plans for leaving Reddit, even if they don't implement them.
I think we'll see a exodus of experienced mods. Maybe even older (account age), more active users. I doubt we'll see a mass exodus of general users. The site is too big. Even if a million people left, there are still millions more.
Yeah an exodus of mods and more active users will hurt, but not enough to kill the site anytime soon. The site culture will change because of this, but the site culture is always changing. Reddit's not the same as it was 5yrs ago or 10yrs ago. Not saying it was better back then, just different.
If there's anything I've learned about social media users -- AKA everyone -- it's that people don't usually care too much about the platform and the company behind it, as long as content is entertaining. That they can keep consuming.
TikTok is the perfect example: the Chinese govt is potentially get all that user data. It's concerning enough that other governments have or are considering banning it. Have people left en masse? Nope. My coworkers still share TikTok videos all the time.
Or how about Facebook and Co.? Facebook has made all sorts of terrible UI changes over the years. That people got angry over. Hell, it's sold user data without user consent. It pumped out enough fake news that it swung an election! It's still probably the largest social media platform in the world.
Or about about Twitter? I'll admit, I'm still on Twitter as a lurker. And my feed is still just as active as it ever was. There's no mass exodus, even with that crazy CEO at the helm.
YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.
While I've been on reddit for nearly 13yrs, I didn't come from Digg. So I don't know why people did leave wholesale for reddit. But I'm starting to think that that was an outlier. And there is something to be said about Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok not really having good alternatives. Twitter does with Mastodon, but it's still nowhere near Twitter's userbase.
I don't know how much Beehaw and the Lemmyverse as a whole has grown in the last month, but something tells me it's still orders of magnitude smaller than reddit. I'm on Tildes -- which does have a restrictive registration policy -- and it's only grown by about 7000 new users in the last ~3 weeks.
I think this could be the beginning of the end of reddit. But it's still way too soon to tell and any results would be far off. It could also be nothing like Spez says. And historically, a massive social media platform dying off hasn't really happened unless the company pulled the plug themselves (Google+). Or it's Digg.
I suppose in the end, the only real change will be- perhaps the quality of content goes down.
Or- maybe us that came over here to lemmyland will just be reddit's competition now.
YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.
Don't get me started on YouTube. lol. They have drove away a lot of the content I used to enjoy seeing.
I think the content creators who have a lot of the technical information that reddit has been used for, moving off site, it's at least going to become a cesspool.
Is Twitter a success now, as it is? Is money with no reputation or morality, success? Facebook is still around, but arguably is is successful, useful, and relevant?
The time frame up to the IPO (I don't know how that timing works) seems to be what is critical. Right now Reddit has been unprofitable. The CEO took on massive new levels of expenses via staffing with no real plan (or it didn't work?) for how to pay for those expenses. This bad faith "negotiation" on API seems aimed at... I guess trading 3rd party utility and to some extent the community for the ability to sell data to AI industry?
I guess we will see but pick a time frame and none of it looks good for Reddit.
A Pyrrhic victory. If he loses a large portion of his moderators, the whole platform will turn to shit. The whole thing was held together by passionate people in key places. Remove and replace with paid goons and the whole site suffers.
It doesn't really matter who created it. If you're using an instance not hosted by by creators, then they can't in any way benefit from it. That's the beauty of federation.
You can host an instance, and if the instance is doing something you don't like, you can certainly change it and prevent it from doing it. If the main Lemmy devs put stuff in most people don't like, the software will just get forked, and most instances will use the non-shitty version.
Lemmy is what the majority of users want it to be, since everyone can just start a competing site that's not suffering from the "outside-the-walled-garden" effect, with a different featureset. Users will move to the instance with the best featureset for themselves.
You’re safe from the big bad scary communists on Lemmy.
Kbin.social doesn't defederate lemmy.ml, so either way we're playing by their "don't say Uyghur genocide because we don't think it's real and we will ban you based on that belief" rules if we accidentally stumble into there.
This is where I would like to see individual-level instance blocking so that it doesn't show up in the home feed, same as how I can block everything that pops up in a language I don't speak.
Edit: Turns out we have that! Just found another thread showing how. On kbin, it's possible to view entire instances separately, and there's a "block" button similar to individual magazines/communities/users. To see lemmy.ml, the link would be
And Reddit has been backed by Tencent - CCP supporters by default - and Peter Thiel - a white supremacists and actual, literal fascist.
The politics of the people behind for-profit endeavours that the public has no actual control over regardless of stake seemingly never comes up. The politics of people behind things that challenge for-profit endeavours and gives control of things back to the public is often under the microscope.
We don't know ernest's politics. What if it came out tomorrow that he was an anarchist? Or that he was also a Leninist? Or was a white supremacist? Or that he liked Nickelback?
I mean he always has the power to strongarm everyone else.
But the consequence is giant boycotts and decay. Idk if winning is the right word. It's like going to war and declaring a win because both nations are destroyed.
I don’t think the ship is doomed yet but they’re definitely in ‘what is that ominous noise coming from the bilge’ territory. To carry on the analogy they’ll plug the leaks as best they can and try and make it to the safe harbour of the IPO (where she can sink at her mooring for all Spez cares) which they could still well do, but it’s also likely the captain and his officers being half-baked sons of lubberly farts will smash into several reefs on the way and sink their already damaged vessel.
Judging by the recent less big brand advertising, I think he was trying to shore up the IPO but failed. At the very least Reddit is still alive but it's going to be valued less.
Yes, but almost all ad-based business models in tech fell, too. There's less advertising money on the internet today than in 2022 or 2021, so investors are more skeptical in business models that primarily rely on internet ad revenue.
Throw in the fact that Reddit's advertising platform is actually difficult to use and not particularly effective, and you have the problem where Reddit simply can't charge the same rates that Facebook and Google can. That's what's going to kill the site, when advertisers decide it's just not worth advertising on that platform.
How platforms die aka enshittification : First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I think that is what counts as sinking for a large social media site nowadays. They’re technically still alive but they’re empty husks of their former selves and will never return to their heydays.
For me, no matter what Reddit is dead. Lemmy is enough for my time wasting and has enough content that I have not missed it one bit. I feel like the communities are smaller, less toxic, and I want to contribute more here. They could completely reverse their decision and I will not return and I hope there are enough like me to make a difference. It just amazes me a site that exists to link to other content on the web and store text comments about said content isn't profitable.
Thing is, if there was in instance or community doing ads, I now can simly block, mute or defederate them. With reddit I had to use an adblocker, scriptblocker and the reddit enhancement suite to be adfree. And I could not be sure it'd stay that way.
The only whiff I got of anything money-related that's not a donation drive for hosting costs is a post by an artist asking whether there's instances ok with them posting links to their patreon alongside their artwork.
...and when it comes to hosting I think things will continue to be donation-run as even 1/1000th of users making comparatively small, regular donations cover costs for the rest. There's always going to be enough people willing to throw in a fiver a month.
I don't see that continuing over time. There is no way that donations alone can sustain major servers as they see growth over time. You're also going to get to a point where a server's admin switches from being a hobby to a job.
There aren't that many websites that can run on donations alone.
Well the decentralized nature of the Fediverse helps spread out the cost. For example you can rent a VPS (virtual private server) for like ten or twenty dollars a month and throw a Lemmy instance on it. That's where many Lemmy instances are currently living. There's your own time involved in maintaining the instance, but the cost should remain pretty stable.
Conversely, a centralized service where all users have to be supported by an individual or company owned cluster of machines can get very expensive. I can't imagine the operating costs for a site like YouTube with the demand for data storage and bandwidth.
Well I think it depends on the balance of growth between nodes and users. If growth of users and growth of instances is proportional, it should be sustainable.
That leaves the question of how well Fediverse software can deal with increasing node numbers. I hope that engineering question has been properly considered. It's like the available number of IP addresses when they initially designed TCP/IP, they never considered four octets might not be enough for future growth.
Nothing on the Internet seems to indicate that use distribution will be even. Power law is going to get involved and some nodes are going to get massive.
Well yeah that will happen. Initially I looked for instances with the biggest subscription base. Then after some reading about the Fediverse I realized that kind of thinking does not apply. You get everything regardless of which node you're on (barring any defederation). Maybe most will realize that, but you're probably right most will not. We'll see how it goes.
For potentially large communities or a large enough group of related small communities, it can be. A core of people could spin up their own server off their own back and/or through donations. Communities exist this way outside of reddit already, this would just be a way to tap into a common interface and interoperability that federation provides. Or is there some centralised thing that means that no matter what someone might impose restrictions?
But not video and maybe limited images to keep costs in check. Maybe video hosting through unlisted youtube videos if that doesn't get curbed.
If they allowed RiF to continue, I'd still use it. I'll pop over on certain subreddits occasionally after July 1st. But I'm enjoying various lemmy instances right now, especially Beehaw.
I'm currently refusing to visit Reddit on principle. If Reddit relented, I would stop actively avoiding them, but I would not go back to it as a primary social outlet.
Same here. Reddit had me going only on inertia for the past few years. Whether they revert their API lalala doesn't matter - the communities are broken and I don't feel like getting up again.
And even if through some divine intervention they manage to repair the communities, I'm like... eh. I went to sit over here now and it's comfy.
At the end of the day, they treat their volunteers and users with disrespect too. The value in reddit isn't from spaz, but rather from the users. Yet Spaz is pretending the services are why people use it.
In fact, I almost wonder if spaz is purposely trying to kill reddit, or whether he's just another narcissist who genuinely believes reddit doesn't need users
Lemmy is filling that void for me nicely. My only complaint is some bugs and lacking features, but that will get ironed out as Lemmy matures. Being wholly community driven is a hugely more solid foundation. And yeah, no ads. I see them rarely anyway because I mainly use a browser with an adblocker, but it's good to know there's no profit motivation for the Fediverse and never will be.
Im pretty close to this as well. I think if they did a 180, and like, showed an ACTUAL attempt to right the ship, I would consider going back via Apollo.
But that said, I've been using Lemmy this week, and out of curiosity I've been comparing it with my reddit feed at the end of the day, and yeah. I really haven't missed out on anything important.
I mostly used Reddit as a way to waste time, or get info on the latest big things, like all the Trump stuff for example, and Lemmy is doing just fine getting me that kind of info.
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