This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they’re still fine.

Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you’re printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.

The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It’s all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.

Everyone loves the idea of scraping, no one likes maintaining scrapers that break once a week because the CSS or HTML changed.

That’s Silicon Valley’s MO. Just half a year ago, people were putting crypto BS in their products.

Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.

If you were a company, you might think twice before advertising on a site that has their users actively, publicly, and loudly trashing on the CEO.

Isn’t this just wishful thinking? Let’s be 100% real for a moment, those people posting fuck spez on r/place aren’t doing it because they’re moving or have moved to an alternative, they’re doing it because they are addicted to Reddit and can’t stop using it. The true protest is moving to an alternative like Lemmy.

If I’m an advertiser, all I see is a very captive audience. This isn’t like the Twitter situation, where your ads will be shown to increasingly objectionable content. In fact, with all the users begrudgingly downloading the official Reddit app, the value of advertising on Reddit may be going up not down.

That being said, Reddit has never been a good place for advertising outside of a few niches, and that hasn’t changed, so in the long run Reddit most likely won’t survive. But in the short run, I don’t think this is the victory lap.

Not understanding the true power you wield or the consequences of your actions

Sibling, I make CRUD apps with React and Python. I don’t think it’s that dramatic lmao

But none of that affects the amount of money they lose.

In fact the CEO of the parent company has been pretty transparent about cost cutting, and I’d bet 30m is probably the lowest yearly losses for Tumblr.

I know people want to make this a moral victory, like the losses are the result of bad community management for Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr but that’s just not true. They were dumpster fires business-wise before they shat on their community, and they were dumpster fires after.

No one has cracked the code on how to make a profitable social media company. The two choices are either community funded (like the Fediverse), or steal all the data like Meta, and arguably the second option isn’t really an option for anyone because Meta would eat your lunch all day everyday.