• Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      445·
      10 months ago

      Hmmm, let’s see.

      • Failing company rooted in a more traditional framework they’re trying to break out of

      • Said company has no idea what they’re doing and keep doing ridiculous things to “break out of” traditional framework

      • Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

      • Said company has no real effective long-term game-plan and keeps changing tack because of bad previous choices

      • There’s a good chance the company could go completely bust because of lack of good business plan and solid leadership

      Redditors: Reddit is the new GameStop!! DRS!! MOASS!!!

      • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
        361·
        10 months ago

        Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

        I’m pretty sure the advertisers - their real customers - asked them to show more ads.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          32·
          10 months ago

          Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk’s lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call “rational” advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.

      • Mechaguana@programming.devEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        Dont forget the booooots sooo mannny boooots how the hell are there such low effort bots everywhere on that site

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          123·
          10 months ago

          I fucking love dumbshit comments like these!

          “I’m going to say this comment is totally wrong, but I don’t actually care enough about the issue to explain it or use more than *checks notes… two words to justify my position.”

          Fucking hilarious, every time.

          • HerrBeter@lemmy.worldEnglish
            413·
            10 months ago

            It’s unlikely I’ll write a longer answer on my phone. But if all you have is ridicule again, and insults, I’ll leave you with some short thoughts.

            Gamestop has been doing fairly well, looking at financials. And people complain about not owning their virtual stuff, which NFT smart contracts could be a solution for. I don’t necessarily agree on the the specifics for blockchain based solution though, nor did I like the picturefest which only obfuscated good use cases.

            Edit: unlike of course vague half truths

              • HerrBeter@lemmy.worldEnglish
                11·
                10 months ago

                It’s a technology, simple as. But since we’re back at the start, who profits the most from not moving status quo?

                What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?

                And wtf simping? Wat

                • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
                  41·
                  10 months ago

                  What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?

                  NFTs do nothing to help this.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      It takes a few weeks for options to become available, but they will.

      If you have a shit ton of money you can buy shorts directly.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1173·
    10 months ago

    Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting “up” or “down” on the content posted by other members.

    I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.

    He’s not an entreprenuer because he didn’t do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.

    I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman’s smarmy little bitch face and I’m fucking here for it.

      • Match!!@pawb.socialEnglish
        46·
        10 months ago

        I’ve tried to go back to Reddit occasionally and it’s garbage, vastly more garbage than I remember last year, from the web design down to the userbase. Whereas I can’t recall a single time I’ve been on lemmy and encountered an [undeclared] bot

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          201·
          10 months ago

          Just today I noticed how low skilled the reddit base seems to be in my general meme/tech/piracy thrmed feed.
          So many basic questions that could literally be answered by or get a start on from ChatGPT etc.
          Instead they pollute the subs with their low effort requests for help or guidance.

          Example: How to get started on pirating anime.

          That was a legit title…

          • Hyperreality@kbin.social
            5·
            10 months ago

            The younger generation is less tech savvy than the millenial generation who were forced to figure stuff out themselves and didn’t have smartphones.

            I get the idea that a lot of people who emigrated to the fediverse are older and also more tech literate given all the linux memes.

            • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              I don’t want to bash those folks that want to liberate themselve but this is either a designed request to engage discussions (state a correct fact, nobody responds vs. state a purposefully wrong fact and everyone and their dogs will come to correct them) or they are literally unable to search google on how to pirate.

              This is like being unable to look up porn by themselve searching “Woman tits naked”.

              • Hyperreality@kbin.social
                2·
                10 months ago

                You have a point. Helps increase engagement, like making a spelling mistake or rage bait.

                Tiresome, but common.

        • kescusay@lemmy.worldEnglish
          18·
          10 months ago

          There are a few bots, mostly spammers. If you mod a community, you can see them. They’re typically caught by the spam filters before I even notice they’re there.

    • eric@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      10 months ago

      And Huffman’s programming skills weren’t even that great because they quickly brought in Aaron Schwartz to make it all work, yet they always conveniently leave him off of the founders’ list.

      • Kyrgizion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        10 months ago

        This is literally the story of almost every successful tech venture. Even in the company I work for, the CEO was a former salesperson while the dev who started it all was still a dev after 20 years. He singlehandedly created the entire product catalog but no one outside of the company knows his name. The CEO’s name is all over everything, including a “book” he “wrote”.

        There’s always a low profile nerd somewhere in the background who is absolutely key to the whole operation but they rarely get cred.

        • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          13·
          10 months ago

          Man I wish you were wrong but I have seen this exact thing 95% of the times I had a look behind closed doors of companies.

          And even more dumb: this nerd usually gets undervalued, and as soon as they leave, it takes about half a year for ppl to realize how fucked they are and frantic recruitment noises to fill the offices in the hopes to pick up the pieces.

          • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            There is a certain satisfaction in leaving a job and then hearing they had to hire three new people to do what you did.

      • Uglyhead@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        Huffman was fucking pissed about how good Alien Blue and Apollo were. He bought and absolutely fucking ruined AB and when he couldn’t buy Apollo (he tried) he crushed it under his boot heel.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    85·
    10 months ago

    Goodness I hope the gamestop nerds find a way to absolutely destroy this. If there is any chance of a scheme working, I will invest.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
    862·
    10 months ago

    Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting “up” or “down” on the content posted by other members.

    Disgraceful, disgusting, lying scum. Say his name: Aaron Swartz

    • Aatube@kbin.social
      271·
      10 months ago

      Aaron Swartz actually didn’t found Reddit. He built a similar company that wasn’t gaining traction, and as both of them were under y-comb and Reddit secretly seeded fake accounts, Swartz and y-comb decided to merge into Reddit. Swartz was sort of their first and hardworking employee instead of a co-founder.

  • twinnie@feddit.ukEnglish
    71·
    10 months ago

    Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.

    • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
      25·
      10 months ago

      I’ve had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded “ackchually” “debates” are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They’re not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from “discussion board” and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that’s where the money’s at.

      My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we’ll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven’t had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        13·
        10 months ago

        The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators

        I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.

        YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.

        I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they’ve pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Reddit do an “AI” push where the “AI” is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.

  • erranto@lemmy.worldEnglish
    561·
    10 months ago

    Contrary to many in here, I don’t think this will cause another exodus from reddit. those who might be concerned by this have already left or reduced their time on the platform

    • Goodie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      241·
      10 months ago

      If Facebook hasn’t had a mas exodus, neither will Reddit.

      Facebooks death is slow and ongoing, and I’m pretty sure Reddit’s will be too.

      • erranto@lemmy.worldEnglish
        243·
        10 months ago

        I don’t know where you are getting your numbers. maybe it’s your selection bias, but facebook’s userbase keeps groing, and even if its getting less teenager engagement, those teenagers are flocking to Meta’s other platform Instagram.

      • 9up999@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        If you move from facebook to instagram or threads why move at all?

        • Jestzer@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          10 months ago

          Because many more people are concerned with where their friends are and what’s cool.

          • 9up999@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Yeah I understand that but I mean it’s same hands so why try at all.

            • Jestzer@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              10 months ago

              Because they don’t care who owns what platform. They care that they’re different and only some of their friends are on one of them and not the other.

    • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
      66·
      10 months ago

      Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They’ll come or they won’t.

      Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It’s probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.

      We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it’s impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.

      • Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        21·
        10 months ago

        no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects

        I’m always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I’m not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I’d love to talk about aren’t in the top 10 most played games list.

        Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there’s only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.

        I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn’t surprise anyone they’re not sticking around after that.

        • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
          271·
          10 months ago

          I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there’s a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you’re posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.

          Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they’re active enough to split.

          At this very moment I’m looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I’ll post to [email protected] because there’s more people there. Off I go!

          • towerful@programming.devEnglish
            16·
            10 months ago

            Exactly.
            Communities need to be more generic until a specialisation becomes too much of the content, then a specific community should be started.

            • Obi@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              3·
              10 months ago

              Basically this is similar to my “organicness” argument. Reddit grew over many years and these niche subs got created as they were needed, not all at once. On Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, there will be another layer of organic growth and organisation with regards to federation, where instances will clump into “neighbourhoods” that users can choose.

        • JimmyMcGill@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          I feel like in some big game communities (like BG3) it looks deader than it should but if you post something you actually get quite a few replies. People are there it’s just that not everyone feels like making a new post.

          Though I agree that concentrating on more generic communities for now is a good solution

      • Mereo@lemmy.caEnglish
        181·
        10 months ago

        User migration is now possible in Lemmy 0.19:

        Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

        Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue

        • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
          6·
          10 months ago

          Oh hey, I guess I learned something today :)

          0.19 has been a real improvement in many ways. I’m a huge fan of the Scaled sort – it helps the niche community content to surface.

      • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
        81·
        10 months ago

        All those toxic Redditors coming here… I hope we can manage to significantly beef up the mod tools before then.

      • BudgieMania@kbin.social
        5·
        10 months ago

        I find Kbin’s Collections feature a good fix for federation confusion. Honestly I think it should be the default type of view when browsing communities, you need to abstract the average user from federation as much as possible and leave browsing by instance as an advance option for those that want to engage with federation in detail

      • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        I still feel like if we want to grow faster organically we need to natively support more “discovery functions”. Just things that you can toggle off like for example a recommendation screen and stuff. The algorithm for it we can make and adapt open source so no one is scared we collect data.

        We’re running into the Linux Vs Windows problem, where you can technically do more stuff and have more control over you account on Lemmy, but you need to be familiar with the fediverse before joining, just to Unterstand how to use Lemmy. That’s a big problem for any potential new user.

      • gt24@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn’t encounter any new major bugs.

    • Aatube@kbin.social
      9·
      10 months ago

      If a user didn’t exodus for the popular subs last time, I don’t see why they would this time.

      • DonutEnglish
        9·
        10 months ago

        Some of those popular subs were reopened with a new mod team that falls in line. Spez was too busy stuffing his ears with ad money instead of listening to his stakeholders

          • DonutEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Point being casual users didn’t see much interruption in the popular subs. So they did not have much incentive to switch to another platform.

            • Aatube@kbin.social
              1·
              10 months ago

              “Didn’t see much interruption”? It was all over r/all and they simply decided to not switch. How will less people remaining to protest make more of a difference?

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.ukEnglish
      26·
      10 months ago

      If you’re serious, just remember the old saying “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you or I can remain solvent”

    • Jeremyward@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      10 months ago

      Usually they don’t allow options on new stocks until after the cutoff period. Unless your broker allows naked shorting.

      • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
        11·
        10 months ago

        Probably not through some online broker, but OTC with an actual trading desk you can short just about anything. In the end it’s just a contract.

        • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          10·
          10 months ago

          Do we really though? Don’t get me wrong it’s some of the most entertaining content I’ve seen on the Internet but I think it brings more harm than good on the whole, especially with the fervor around GME that spun off into being downright delusional. I’d prefer if we don’t end up bringing that over here tbh.

          I think the ‘old’ wsb even would be sort of borderline with the egging on and memefication of gambling one’s life savings on weeklies

    • themaninblack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      10 months ago

      I think what may buoy them is the fact that you must append “Reddit” to searches, however, ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi are giving them a run for their money

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      10 months ago

      Not financial advice, but there’s been a few times I wanted to short something (I didn’t in the end) but one thing to watch out for after an IPO is the date insiders are allowed to start selling stock. It’s often 6 months or so after the IPO and can cause share price to drop.

      So if a company jumps in value post IPO, there might be an opportunity to short it at some point, with the options expiring a period of time after the insider sell off date.

      I imagine I’m going to do some paper trades on reddit on this and see what happens. I’m rooting for them to do poorly. Fuck u/Spez

      Edit: And to clarify, I mean buy puts on something. I’d never short something directly.