7 ms·

It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut i

by p-e-w 3y ago

It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut it down. Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.

MattGaiser 3y ago
I get buying it for that purpose, but why then kill it? Especially when it is a personal video platform, when Reddit is mostly an anonymous text platform?
- klabb3 3y ago
  That only makes sense when there’s competition. Why maintain two apps when it’s cheaper to maintain one? Now, in this case it seems like an awful strategic choice, given what happened with TikTok. But I think the reason is nevertheless the same. Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
  - bboygravity 3y ago
    That's not (modern) capitalism. That's simply -not- capitalism.
    - losteric 3y ago
      Are you saying that rent seeking and anti-competitiveness are "not capitalist"? How do you figure?
    - hkt 3y ago
      Alas, you're incorrect. It is the whole point of capitalism.
      - DiscourseFan 3y ago
        Maybe real life capitalism. Fantasy capitalism, on the other hand...
        soco 3y ago
        But this is the same discussion as with communism, where the fans will rush you for saying that real-life communism sucks so badly, and tell you they will do it By The Book (or something). It's always surprising how many people take their truths from books instead of what's in front of their noses...
        DiscourseFan 3y ago
        Unfortunately, Real Capitalism has never been tried before... The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being. Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do). The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement. I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself. Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      That is exactly how the systems of capitalism play out in real life. As the old adage goes, competition is for losers.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Of course it is. It's right there in the name. It's not "competitism" or "winwinnism" or "fairism". Capitalism is about accumulating and making money from capital - that is, making money from what you own, not from what you do. It's pretty close to rent seeking - I'd dare say "rent seeking" is what we call it when you do capitalism too hard, and it starts feeling viscerally unfair.
- rvba 3y ago
  They try to make reddit a picture-first based platform. What alienates the user base. Also why does reddit mobile site lag? Takes 5-10 seconds of the stupid icon before you see the text. Compare it to instant i.reddit or old.reddit. Are they so incompetent that they cannot write a site that doesnt lag? Or they just dont care?
  - sethammons 3y ago
    They want to intentionally hamper the website to drive mobile app usage for more juicy data. They don't care about those users who fail to migrate as they are generating less revenue. They begrudgingly keep things working just enough to keep some engagement to drive mobile app use. They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
- spit2wind 3y ago
  Robert Reich explains it well using Hacksaw Bob. There are facets he doesn't touch on in that example which he addresses in the full series. Very excellent presentation. Hacksaw Bob: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 Whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGaThgpFkrZY0jr https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGa...
  - zuppy 3y ago
    i think you wanted to post this for "hacksaw bob": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGhJyAYZj9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGhJyAYZj9o instead of the BMW review :)
FormerBandmate 3y ago
Acquihires are definitely a thing but the way they talked about it at the time it was a major acquisition to diversify Reddit and pivot it to video. It even made the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddit-snaps-up-dubsmash-to-expand-in-fast-growing-video-app-market-11607912841 https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddit-snaps-up-dubsmash-to-exp... Dubsmash had a sizable userbase with almost no overlap with Reddit's and their conversion rate appears to be less than 0.01%
- ghusto 3y ago
  And the way a certain MassiveCorp talked about the acquisition of my previous workplace, lead less experienced employees to believe they were doing so in order to diversity their offerings in that area. Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    3-6 months?
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      Traditionally 12-18mos... Mo 1-3 is new owners finding all the buried bodies, and restructuring leadership with people they can trust 3-6 mos is learning who is valuable and who is not (overlap with months 1-3) 6-9 mos is predicting how customers will react to X change or Y Change 9-12mos is final legal review of changes, exit packages, PR statements,etc (especially is mass layoffs are involved) 12-18mos is execution time frame for layoffs, and restructure of the organization
      - webnrrd2k 3y ago
        That's exactly the standard playbook. The acquisition happens, and there is a lot of talk sbout how important it is to keep everything the same, no one getting fired, no real changes except for a few different people to report to. Basically, no one gets fired in the first year while the new owners figure out what's actually going on with their purchase. After the first year is when people get fired.
lozenge 3y ago
Imagine if Facebook shut down its acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta would be an irrelevancy.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Dubsmash allowed users to videotape themselves while lip syncing over audio clips and including sections of songs, movies, and famous quotes. Users could upload their own audio and add colour but not filters and text animation to their videos Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine. Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.
- soco 3y ago
  I wonder, would TikTok have been the same if another stupid acquisition wouldn't have killed Vine?
ymolodtsov 3y ago
There are a bunch of new players in the space. Bluesky and Nostr. BeReal was very mainstream at one point. It is just a very tough business.
slashtab 3y ago
The way Amazon buy and clear out its competition.
intelVISA 3y ago
Atlassian sends its regards.
JSavageOne 3y ago
I'm surprised this doesn't violate anti-trust laws. Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism. That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments. Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
  - cshimmin 3y ago
    I agree with much of what you wrote, except that if you don't think business have ALWAYS been running on the principle of "make money and disregard external costs to society/environment/human well-being", that's just rose colored lenses. Even in the pre-USSR-collapse heyday you're referring to, look no further than the tobacco industry. They literally killed people because it was profitable. I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.

by p-e-w 3y ago

MattGaiser 3y ago

I get buying it for that purpose, but why then kill it? Especially when it is a personal video platform, when Reddit is mostly an anonymous text platform?

klabb3 3y ago
That only makes sense when there’s competition. Why maintain two apps when it’s cheaper to maintain one? Now, in this case it seems like an awful strategic choice, given what happened with TikTok. But I think the reason is nevertheless the same. Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  That's not (modern) capitalism. That's simply -not- capitalism.
  - losteric 3y ago
    Are you saying that rent seeking and anti-competitiveness are "not capitalist"? How do you figure?
  - hkt 3y ago
    Alas, you're incorrect. It is the whole point of capitalism.
    - DiscourseFan 3y ago
      Maybe real life capitalism. Fantasy capitalism, on the other hand...
      - soco 3y ago
        But this is the same discussion as with communism, where the fans will rush you for saying that real-life communism sucks so badly, and tell you they will do it By The Book (or something). It's always surprising how many people take their truths from books instead of what's in front of their noses...
        DiscourseFan 3y ago
        Unfortunately, Real Capitalism has never been tried before... The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being. Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do). The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement. I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself. Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    That is exactly how the systems of capitalism play out in real life. As the old adage goes, competition is for losers.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Of course it is. It's right there in the name. It's not "competitism" or "winwinnism" or "fairism". Capitalism is about accumulating and making money from capital - that is, making money from what you own, not from what you do. It's pretty close to rent seeking - I'd dare say "rent seeking" is what we call it when you do capitalism too hard, and it starts feeling viscerally unfair.
rvba 3y ago
They try to make reddit a picture-first based platform. What alienates the user base. Also why does reddit mobile site lag? Takes 5-10 seconds of the stupid icon before you see the text. Compare it to instant i.reddit or old.reddit. Are they so incompetent that they cannot write a site that doesnt lag? Or they just dont care?
- sethammons 3y ago
  They want to intentionally hamper the website to drive mobile app usage for more juicy data. They don't care about those users who fail to migrate as they are generating less revenue. They begrudgingly keep things working just enough to keep some engagement to drive mobile app use. They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
spit2wind 3y ago
Robert Reich explains it well using Hacksaw Bob. There are facets he doesn't touch on in that example which he addresses in the full series. Very excellent presentation. Hacksaw Bob: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 Whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGaThgpFkrZY0jr https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGa...
- zuppy 3y ago
  i think you wanted to post this for "hacksaw bob": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGhJyAYZj9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGhJyAYZj9o instead of the BMW review :)

FormerBandmate 3y ago

Acquihires are definitely a thing but the way they talked about it at the time it was a major acquisition to diversify Reddit and pivot it to video. It even made the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddit-snaps-up-dubsmash-to-expand-in-fast-growing-video-app-market-11607912841 https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddit-snaps-up-dubsmash-to-exp... Dubsmash had a sizable userbase with almost no overlap with Reddit's and their conversion rate appears to be less than 0.01%

ghusto 3y ago
And the way a certain MassiveCorp talked about the acquisition of my previous workplace, lead less experienced employees to believe they were doing so in order to diversity their offerings in that area. Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  3-6 months?
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    Traditionally 12-18mos... Mo 1-3 is new owners finding all the buried bodies, and restructuring leadership with people they can trust 3-6 mos is learning who is valuable and who is not (overlap with months 1-3) 6-9 mos is predicting how customers will react to X change or Y Change 9-12mos is final legal review of changes, exit packages, PR statements,etc (especially is mass layoffs are involved) 12-18mos is execution time frame for layoffs, and restructure of the organization
    - webnrrd2k 3y ago
      That's exactly the standard playbook. The acquisition happens, and there is a lot of talk sbout how important it is to keep everything the same, no one getting fired, no real changes except for a few different people to report to. Basically, no one gets fired in the first year while the new owners figure out what's actually going on with their purchase. After the first year is when people get fired.

lozenge 3y ago

Imagine if Facebook shut down its acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta would be an irrelevancy.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>Dubsmash allowed users to videotape themselves while lip syncing over audio clips and including sections of songs, movies, and famous quotes. Users could upload their own audio and add colour but not filters and text animation to their videos Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine. Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.

soco 3y ago
I wonder, would TikTok have been the same if another stupid acquisition wouldn't have killed Vine?

ymolodtsov 3y ago

There are a bunch of new players in the space. Bluesky and Nostr. BeReal was very mainstream at one point. It is just a very tough business.

slashtab 3y ago

The way Amazon buy and clear out its competition.

intelVISA 3y ago

Atlassian sends its regards.

JSavageOne 3y ago

I'm surprised this doesn't violate anti-trust laws. Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism.

mschuster91 3y ago
> Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism. That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments. Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
- cshimmin 3y ago
  I agree with much of what you wrote, except that if you don't think business have ALWAYS been running on the principle of "make money and disregard external costs to society/environment/human well-being", that's just rose colored lenses. Even in the pre-USSR-collapse heyday you're referring to, look no further than the tobacco industry. They literally killed people because it was profitable. I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.