wpietri

63 ms·

931.
by wpietri 3y ago
I get what you're saying, but that's a bad approach for all concerned. For Reddit Inc, it's bad because they'll under-charge for things where they could capture more money, and over-charge for things that are helpful to
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by wpietri 3y ago
Yes, and I never said otherwise. You can sustain a business by breaking even. Or by making a modest profit. Which is what the great majority of businesses do. Trying to make a massive profit is another activity altogether, and the quest to
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by wpietri 3y ago
Reddit-the-community's intent is not for it to be publicly traded. That's the intent of a very small number of people who seek to profit off of Reddit-the-community.
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by wpietri 3y ago
For years I've been joking about selling an "internet battery" for people going off the grid. I had no idea that some mad bastards actually did it!
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by wpietri 3y ago
Thanks. Very helpful. One of the wild things to me is how incredibly elaborate chipmaking as become over the years. Per Wikipedia, the 6502's layout was made with "a very manual process done with color pencils and vellum paper&quo
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by wpietri 3y ago
Twitter wasn't doing great at the time, but from the way Dorsey now talks about it, I don't think it was Vine or Bankruptcy: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-biggest-regret-k...
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by wpietri 3y ago
That's correct. It was launched as "Birdwatch" long before Musk arrived: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
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by wpietri 3y ago
I believe it is now. Search used to work without being signed in, but I'm pretty sure that changed at some point in the post-Elon era.
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by wpietri 3y ago
People were getting banned for harassing individual laid-off journalists. A tweet expressing a view about good jobs for journalists changing industries was not ever a problem, so it wasn't a free-speech concern. Being a dick to peopl
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by wpietri 3y ago
I did not get fired by Elon, so that's a swing and a miss. Any other straw men you wanted to try? You're wrong about the "average user" enjoying "free speech", of course. That's the view Twitter started ou
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by wpietri 3y ago
Part of what makes this example interesting to me is that it didn't just change the minds of random people, who did their best with uncertain information. It changed some of the expert views on disease transmission, where the paradigm
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by wpietri 3y ago
It sounds like you think it odd that exec-level staff should be honoring the wishes of the people who do all the work, but I'm not getting why. Sure, most companies are authoritarian hierarchies. But most companies also pay people enou
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by wpietri 3y ago
Profit is a balance between income and expenses. He's hired a ton of people in hopes that they could radically increase their revenues. So it's a little rich for him to complain that Reddit isn't profitable when he's the
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by wpietri 3y ago
Sorry, why do you think this is a hard question? They look around at the big clients, see anybody who has violated the API's TOS by removing ads without special permission, and kill their API keys.
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by wpietri 3y ago
It depends on what "representative" means here. Most people lurk, but they definitionally don't contribute to the labor that makes the site valuable. I'd be interested in their opinion here, but honoring a strike isn&#x2
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by wpietri 3y ago
No. Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability. That's part of the devil's bargain of VC money. If it looks like your company will be a modest success, they will push you to make it a giant one no matter how much
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by wpietri 3y ago
Me? No, I would not. For nearly 20 years I helped run Bandwagon, a co-op of nerds who toward the end of the dot-com bubble needed a place to put their personal web projects. We clubbed together to rent a full colo rack and we each put our s
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by wpietri 3y ago
Quote tweets could be used for a lot of things. I mainly used it to add positive commentary or useful context to something I wanted to share with my followers. Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution t
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by wpietri 3y ago
Oh? What are some examples of the "censorship is not like before" that you think have improved things?
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by wpietri 3y ago
The bulk of what I said can be verified from other sources, so if you don't like Casey Newton, feel free to look for other stuff. But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitt
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by wpietri 3y ago
Your implication is that if they don't need more money, they can just ignore all those investor-owned shares? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Reddit's an odd duck given their ownership history and their investors. But
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by wpietri 3y ago
If you're claiming that the main things Reddit mods do is a bit of rule text and some CSS, then I don't think you know enough about the topic to be worth further discussion.
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by wpietri 3y ago
It is really theirs? They have legal ownership, sure, so they can do this without forcible intervention by the state. But laws are things we make up to memorialize our agreements on what we think should happen, so focusing on legal ownershi
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by wpietri 3y ago
I still feel bad for whatever web developer had to check in the "this page looks better in the app" banner.
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by wpietri 3y ago
Yeah, I don't know how it is for everybody, but I'm reminded of the line, "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip." When I've been at places that have taken VC money, there's always a deep, pervasive
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by wpietri 3y ago
I think it's not so much optimism as getting so blinded by the nominal, theoretical purpose that they don't pay attention to what people are actually doing. As they say, "follow the money". That'll tell you the diff
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by wpietri 3y ago
If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could have a free version of the API that includes the inline ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a share of that reven
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by wpietri 3y ago
Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically, outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have departed, and the value of the company has fallen by something between half and two thirds. One of its core assets, the blue c
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by wpietri 3y ago
Reddit took $1.3 billion in investor money. What makes you say they're not having their chain yanked? Going public solves an investor problem, but I don't see it solving anything for Reddit's community.
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by wpietri 3y ago
I'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it. And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable. A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It me

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