this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
391 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22063 readers
19 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
First I don't see why reddit has to be a for profit organisation in the first place, since that's kind of the rout of the problem. Users becoming a product that reddit is trying to sell to advertisers. At the same time if reddit would be respectful to users, creators and mods it would be a different story. But they are clearly not, they don't respect the people who are making reddit work - but feel entitled to the fruits of their labor. That just irks me on a deeply personal level.
My main problem is not even with the API decision but with the way the CEO communicated with the community.
COMPLETELY agree that reddit shouldn't have developed in a commercial direction, but rather as a non-profit. That would avoided so many problems. That said, even as a non-profit losing money is not tenable.
I also agree that how the CEO communicated is a big part of the problem.
Do we know they are losing money? Do we even know they are not making money? It is more likely that they are not making enough money to satisfy the stock holders and give big payouts to the principles.
Generally an organuzation does not need to make money to stay in business. They do however need a positive cash flow and assets need to exceed liabilities generally or at least by enough creditors will not force bankrupcy. So profit is entirely optional. However for a typical stockholder company the profit expectations are unlimited.
If I understand correctly they currently don't have investers currently since they made this move as part of their attempts to take the company public, so there's even less of an excuse.
They are a private company, not a public one. That does not mean they do not have investors. They have investors but they are privately held and probably private equity investors. I do not know exactly who or what investor groups own Reddit, but since it is a company it has investors.