this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Capitalism. Monetise everything no matter the cost to the users
To expand on this, it's not just capitalism - it's greed.
Potato potato
No it's just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit's way of doing that.
Well,greed causes capitalism
I don't think "greed" is quite the right word. "Greed" would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable. But they're not: they're trying to make themselves profitable at all. That's not about greed, but about surviving. You can't survive unless you stop hemorrhaging money at some point.
Maybe the question is "Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they're going to become super-shitty one day?"
I mean regardless of whether it's greed or not it's happening because they need to generate a profit period lol.
David Harvey has been ringing the bell on this for at least a decade lol. Effectively capitalism runs out of profitable investments when you need continued YoY growth. Like finding trillions of new investment opportunities a year is just not realistic. So capitalists fund bullshit projects and flow their money into markets where the perceived value is significantly greater than any of the actual socially necessary value. And that distance grows greater over time, until people realize 'what the fuck are we funding' (like what happened with crypto, or the metaverse), and then that gap immediately shrinks and the unlucky capitalists lose their money. And that will continue happening.
YES.
do you think this move will be good for their business?
You ask on Lemmy…
Exactly -- this is almost certainly bad for Reddit's business at this point. The problem here isn't necessarily capitalism so much as it is a egocentric CEO gone mad with power.
Yea, I am not a capitalism enjoyer, but it's comical watching people insert their favorite pet politics as the sole reason for everything that's happening.
I don’t even think it’s a bad business decision.
Most people didn’t use 3rd party apps to begin with. I’d guess about 75% of the vocal minority who protested, will continue to use Reddit.
And a very small % of people will quit Reddit in favor of Lemmy.
Cheers for being the very small %
I’d argue it is, because of the damage they’re doing to their brand.
I’ve said it in a couple other threads, but Reddit has other ways they can monetize their 3rd party app users, such as requiring subscriptions to use third party apps, or even by simply giving third party app devs a longer lead time to change to a paid model. Instead of doing either of those things, the CEO had a tantrum and alienated a bunch of people.
But first be not as terrible to the users to attract them, then hope they're lazy enough to not go anywhere when you treat them terribly later while they squeeze value from them