5 ms·

I'd kill for a chilling effect on acquisitions. Every single fucking time something I like gets acquired, it takes anywhere between a few months to a couple yea

by jchw 2y ago

I'd kill for a chilling effect on acquisitions. Every single fucking time something I like gets acquired, it takes anywhere between a few months to a couple years before it is completely ruined. Maybe if we're lucky, Microsoft will acquire Discord and run it into the ground the way they did with Skype. (Then, we can all go back to IRC, right? ... Right, guys?)

fallingknife 2y ago
If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.
- jchw 2y ago
  Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about. The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days. That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.) For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it. I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.
  - alex1138 2y ago
    I take one thing out of the Musk acquisition that goes beyond just being buying a product, which is that there was a real problem under Jack Dorsey that they were banning people for explicitly ideological reasons, significantly for covid "misinformation", that wasn't. Including doctors/researchers, and qualified people to speak who went away from the mainstream narrative. Like, one of the first things he did was take Jay Bhattacharya (coauthor of Great Barrington Declaration) and show him he had been put under a blacklist by the old regime of Twitter I think the reason this gets ignored is because there's too many people on a certain part of the political spectrum where they see covid censorship as a nothingburger when actually it was a massive problem and whatever else people think of Elon I don't think you can take away from him that the situation was intolerable
    - jchw 2y ago
      I hated Twitter before and after the acquisition, for a number of reasons. The last time I really liked Twitter was probably 2015. It's hard to qualify everything that was wrong with Twitter, but it'll probably be somewhat overshadowed by the Musk era because Musk is such a big dumbass. He also didn't really resolve a lot of Twitter's old issues with ideological bias, he just replaced it with less popular ideological bias. Twitter doesn't really feel like it is any less of a hellscape where people get banned for wrongthink, it just leans differently in high profile decisions...
- singron 2y ago
  Post-acquisition products can still dominate their market even if they have declining quality. E.g. they can be bundled with other offerings from the parent company. This is exactly the point of anti-trust.
soulofmischief 2y ago
When you build a company, if you're looking to cash out and work on something else, it's either going to be by selling shares or getting acquired. Getting acquired can certainly be much less of a headache and risk vs going public or finding private investors to buy out a portion of your shares.
dpoloncsak 2y ago
Its more likely we like the things we like because they're still in their "Acquire users" phase, and haven't run out of VC funding yet. Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase we all know and love.
- jchw 2y ago
  Personally, I always liked things that never had an "acquire users" phase, or VC funding, but those things are less shiny (and frankly, less user-friendly.)
  - willy_k 2y ago
    Shoutout Mullvad VPN, honorable mention to Tailscale (they had an acquire users phase and VC funding but a rug pull does not seem likely for the time being).
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase Instagram had less than a tenth of its current user base when it was bought [1]. [1] https://time.com/4299297/instagram-facebook-revenue/ https://time.com/4299297/instagram-facebook-revenue/
  - immibis 2y ago
    Objection: relevance
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  If that's true then the downside to chilling acquisitions becomes... fewer "nice" things destined to rug-pull their users? Still not seeing the problem.
- timewizard 2y ago
  Gee if only there was a middle ground between these two extremes and the market somehow sought to achieve that state. Perhaps some simple market regulations might achieve this? And some enforcement of those regulations fairly and reasonably? Maybe a specific agency tasked with this?
surge 2y ago
TBF Skype wasn't profitable when MS bought it, it every much was in the line of make something everyone wants to use and figure out how to make money later. Skype was more or less free to use and it didn't make enough from paid services to cover its operating costs if I remember correctly. So it was always someone buys it or it dies. The point of many of those companies is to get bought out and then get enshitified or stripped for its IP and integrated into for profit products. Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix. People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.
- jchw 2y ago
  > People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like. What?! I do know this, and take great offense to the insinuation that my comment is "reddit"-like. I didn't feel it necessary to iterate over how VCware works since, as you said, everyone already gets that part. Anyway, the "this place is getting more like Reddit by the day" thing has been a Hacker News staple for (well) over a decade too. Check the end of the HN guidelines, you'll have a chuckle.
  - surge 2y ago
    Sorry, just I thought anyone lurking here for a while was pretty familiar with the whole model of "offer service for free to gain user adoption, then sell out or pivot". Most of these services that we enjoy simply aren't sustainable and are running on borrowed time (or VC money).
    - anonymars 2y ago
      I'm confused, is familiarity with it somehow an argument for it? As I understand, the complaint was that things get ruined once acquired. Great, we all know that it's in part because of unsustainable business models in the hope of getting acquired*. Does that mean we have to like it? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage companies to have sustainable business models? *But also not entirely. Even if you build a sustainable business model, for you it's throwing off profit and that's gravy for you. But once someone buys it from you, suddenly they are in the hole and have an investment to recoup, especially if they overpaid. And so the temptation arises to goose things to pay back that investment more quickly
guestbest 2y ago
I don’t think we can go back to some things like ircd or mud talkers because they are too “chatty” to users. People like simplified centralized services with on screen discovery in the form of popups. The small internet will have to stay small
- jchw 2y ago
  That'd be more than fine with me, except the small internet competes for attention with the rest of the internet and gets slaughtered by their attention-sucking applications with shiny animations, spammy push notifications, gamification and manipulative FOMO-inducing tricks. This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet. User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.
  - jjulius 2y ago
    >This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet. This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing. >Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.
googlryas 2y ago
What makes you think the products you like will even be launched, if the acquisition pathway to success is not available?
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  Most of my favorite services are either foss based or owned privately with minimal VC. I think maybe everyone should adjust their definition of success to include treating users fairly long term instead of milking them over prolonged enshittification periods.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dbg31415 2y ago
Discord's recent UI updates (updated skins, or whatever it's called) show they can do a great job of running their own product into the ground just fine. https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord-to-revert-ui-changes-after-massive-desktop-update-3170407/ https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord...

by jchw 2y ago

fallingknife 2y ago

If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.

jchw 2y ago
Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about. The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days. That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.) For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it. I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.
- alex1138 2y ago
  I take one thing out of the Musk acquisition that goes beyond just being buying a product, which is that there was a real problem under Jack Dorsey that they were banning people for explicitly ideological reasons, significantly for covid "misinformation", that wasn't. Including doctors/researchers, and qualified people to speak who went away from the mainstream narrative. Like, one of the first things he did was take Jay Bhattacharya (coauthor of Great Barrington Declaration) and show him he had been put under a blacklist by the old regime of Twitter I think the reason this gets ignored is because there's too many people on a certain part of the political spectrum where they see covid censorship as a nothingburger when actually it was a massive problem and whatever else people think of Elon I don't think you can take away from him that the situation was intolerable
  - jchw 2y ago
    I hated Twitter before and after the acquisition, for a number of reasons. The last time I really liked Twitter was probably 2015. It's hard to qualify everything that was wrong with Twitter, but it'll probably be somewhat overshadowed by the Musk era because Musk is such a big dumbass. He also didn't really resolve a lot of Twitter's old issues with ideological bias, he just replaced it with less popular ideological bias. Twitter doesn't really feel like it is any less of a hellscape where people get banned for wrongthink, it just leans differently in high profile decisions...
singron 2y ago
Post-acquisition products can still dominate their market even if they have declining quality. E.g. they can be bundled with other offerings from the parent company. This is exactly the point of anti-trust.

soulofmischief 2y ago

When you build a company, if you're looking to cash out and work on something else, it's either going to be by selling shares or getting acquired. Getting acquired can certainly be much less of a headache and risk vs going public or finding private investors to buy out a portion of your shares.

dpoloncsak 2y ago

Its more likely we like the things we like because they're still in their "Acquire users" phase, and haven't run out of VC funding yet. Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase we all know and love.

jchw 2y ago
Personally, I always liked things that never had an "acquire users" phase, or VC funding, but those things are less shiny (and frankly, less user-friendly.)
- willy_k 2y ago
  Shoutout Mullvad VPN, honorable mention to Tailscale (they had an acquire users phase and VC funding but a rug pull does not seem likely for the time being).
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase Instagram had less than a tenth of its current user base when it was bought [1]. [1] https://time.com/4299297/instagram-facebook-revenue/ https://time.com/4299297/instagram-facebook-revenue/
- immibis 2y ago
  Objection: relevance
idle_zealot 2y ago
If that's true then the downside to chilling acquisitions becomes... fewer "nice" things destined to rug-pull their users? Still not seeing the problem.
timewizard 2y ago
Gee if only there was a middle ground between these two extremes and the market somehow sought to achieve that state. Perhaps some simple market regulations might achieve this? And some enforcement of those regulations fairly and reasonably? Maybe a specific agency tasked with this?

surge 2y ago

TBF Skype wasn't profitable when MS bought it, it every much was in the line of make something everyone wants to use and figure out how to make money later. Skype was more or less free to use and it didn't make enough from paid services to cover its operating costs if I remember correctly. So it was always someone buys it or it dies. The point of many of those companies is to get bought out and then get enshitified or stripped for its IP and integrated into for profit products. Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix. People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.

jchw 2y ago
> People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like. What?! I do know this, and take great offense to the insinuation that my comment is "reddit"-like. I didn't feel it necessary to iterate over how VCware works since, as you said, everyone already gets that part. Anyway, the "this place is getting more like Reddit by the day" thing has been a Hacker News staple for (well) over a decade too. Check the end of the HN guidelines, you'll have a chuckle.
- surge 2y ago
  Sorry, just I thought anyone lurking here for a while was pretty familiar with the whole model of "offer service for free to gain user adoption, then sell out or pivot". Most of these services that we enjoy simply aren't sustainable and are running on borrowed time (or VC money).
  - anonymars 2y ago
    I'm confused, is familiarity with it somehow an argument for it? As I understand, the complaint was that things get ruined once acquired. Great, we all know that it's in part because of unsustainable business models in the hope of getting acquired*. Does that mean we have to like it? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage companies to have sustainable business models? *But also not entirely. Even if you build a sustainable business model, for you it's throwing off profit and that's gravy for you. But once someone buys it from you, suddenly they are in the hole and have an investment to recoup, especially if they overpaid. And so the temptation arises to goose things to pay back that investment more quickly

guestbest 2y ago

I don’t think we can go back to some things like ircd or mud talkers because they are too “chatty” to users. People like simplified centralized services with on screen discovery in the form of popups. The small internet will have to stay small

jchw 2y ago
That'd be more than fine with me, except the small internet competes for attention with the rest of the internet and gets slaughtered by their attention-sucking applications with shiny animations, spammy push notifications, gamification and manipulative FOMO-inducing tricks. This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet. User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.
- jjulius 2y ago
  >This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet. This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing. >Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.

googlryas 2y ago

What makes you think the products you like will even be launched, if the acquisition pathway to success is not available?

bitmasher9 2y ago
Most of my favorite services are either foss based or owned privately with minimal VC. I think maybe everyone should adjust their definition of success to include treating users fairly long term instead of milking them over prolonged enshittification periods.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dbg31415 2y ago

Discord's recent UI updates (updated skins, or whatever it's called) show they can do a great job of running their own product into the ground just fine. https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord-to-revert-ui-changes-after-massive-desktop-update-3170407/ https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord...