this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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But this thing with the Reddit API is, uh, directly related to capitalism? This isn't grasping at straws, it's literally capitalists doing a capitalism.
Like, they're going "give us a bunch of money, or we're going to restrict your access to this, because it's our private property". At it's core, that... That's what capitalism is.
I don't want to appear more pedantic than I am, but in my book capitalism is all about how to generate and accumulate money from propriety. so it would have been a better move to milk third party app, than to kill them with unrealistic price. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
undefined> But this thing with the Reddit API is, uh, directly related to capitalism?
No, it's directly related to management making a terrible and short-sighted decision. Capitalism is a concept, it's not a person taking action based on a decision. Maybe that decision is, in turn, based on capitalistic ideas, but then the policy isn't directly related to capitalism and is instead an indirect consequence.
Here, its born of bad problem solving, terrible communication, and inept strategy. Not an intrinsic problem with capitalism.
They've been loosing money for 20 years, now they want the IPO so they need to show that they can also make money.
If they're losing so much money then why do they have 2000 employees?
Capitalism
Yeah weird where are they getting money?
Outside investors -- people who gave money in exchange for ownership of the company and its IP. They're received about 1.3 billion dollars in five or six rounds of funding from external investors. Reddit's motivation to IPO is to pay off those investors and restructure ownership of the company.
Oh, so reddit isn't really a capitalist thing where it's competition making it better? It's more like it just found the right people to beg from, but they want paid back?
Yes, that's how a lot of tech companies work in late-stage capitalism. It's more about stock prices than "begging" though.
Yup. Investors want free value. They want more than they paid, and unprofitable businesses don't tend to offer that.
They need to at least look profitable for the short period of time before the IPO, and insinuate that they'll continue to be after.