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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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I think it's a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.
If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come
Nailed it, investors are demanding profit increases, it's not just interest rates (though they're the main reason) but also the corporate tax cuts in 2018 basically dumped a ton of profit onto corporations because they repatriated all their offshore cash they'd been hoarding.
That bump lasted 2 years, but the expectation of higher revenue is still there, it doesn't matter if you got lucky at slots last month, if you make your normal salary this month investors will be absolutely pissed.
This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.
Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.
This timeline is the stupid one.
This is what irritates me. You still made money just not as much as you wanted or hoped so your company punishes you. You can't have infinite growth
Every publicly-traded company: "Hold my beer"
Capitalism: "Numbers go brrrrr"
Most companies really are that retarded because everyone wants to look good and take credit for every great thing happening. People like that should not be in charge of anything.
This is also a great example of why higher interest rates aren't automatically a terrible thing. In general, it's probably a good sign for the economy that companies are expected to be profitable. Means resources are being used well. The limitless VC money kinda meant any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding.
I wish we lived in a society where not everything needed to be profitable. People deserve treats and sucks to have things that made our lives better go awake because shareholders demand money
There are a number of ways things can function that way. Unfortunately, they don't scale well.
This is part of my hope of federalisation, it lets a group of small entities act as a single large entity. It also lets non-profit and profit making work together. The for-profit provide the brute force, the non-profits keep them from going off the rails too far. It might be the workaround we need.
Also, be the change you want. For-profit businesses often win due to the far better returns. More people are willing to pour the effort into a business that could make them rich than a charity that never will.
I think we'd see loads of improvements if the philosophy went from "be as profitable as possible" to "just be profitable". You're 15% lower than last year, but still profiting? That's just a smaller bonus for all employees and a smaller dividend for the investors, after putting a healthy amount of it into savings.
There's no concept of "enough". That's the big problem. It goes for both economics and career advancement. There doesn't always have to be a "higher". It's okay to say "it isn't worth it to go further".
Whether we like the ongoing enshittification of Reddit or not, I think it's fair that shareholders expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.
That problem wouldn't have existed if Reddit was a non-profit though, like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Whilst I agree that investors have everybright to expect a return on investment I think this could have been resolved and a number of ways which didn't include alienating a large proportion of the user base.
Exactly I’m tired of all these capitalism apologists. The aim is to innovate, there must be a more decent way to monetise or profit. If pursuing such hardline tactics means profitable at the expense of your customers and enshitification of your platform, I’d urge you to reconsider your business setup.
The capitalism apologist is going to tell you that this is necessary for innovation as Venture Capital firms fund 100 start-ups of which 99 fail to turn a profit, and thus the 1 that does has to make up for the other 99 by making extreme profits.
But that that is just as flawed logic as thinking that there can be a "decent" capitalism that doesn't destroy everything in its path in its pursuit of profit. If you are trying to be "decent" you will be out-competed by someone else under the current economic setup.
The modern Neoliberal capitalist philosophy of shareholders being the only priority, isn't the only capitalist philosophy.
The Imbeded liberalism after the new deal, worked quite well. Since the employees are making the products, and management is making the decisions, while the shareholders don't directly make anything for the company; People understood that the shareholders were the last priority, in getting profits. It's why worker wages scaled with productivity until the 80s.
That's when the Neoliberal capitalist philosophy took hold and gained power. First the Republicans with Regan, then Democrats with Clinton, then the global economy, since so much of it is driven by the US.
You're right, to some extent, but you have to ask yourself why neoliberalism took hold and gained power. The problem with social democracy, even though it's the best version of a shitty economic system, is that it's still capitalism and at some point greedy assholes are going to want more, and will start influencing politics to get what they want. That's why neoliberalism became a thing, despite the succes of social democracy/embedded liberalism for the 99%, because there still was a 1% with much more power and influence. Neoliberalism was a planned and calculated attack on social democracy decades in the making by groups like the Mont Pelerin Society and individuals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Reagan was just a public symptom of this disease under the surface. If you keep capitalism in place in any way, it will always eventually trend towards it's natural endpoint of 0.01% being obscenely, unfathomably rich and the rest getting fucked over in every possible way.
"0.01% being obscenely, unfathomably rich and the rest getting fucked over in every possible way."
Sounds more like Soviet Russia and its satellite states.
I think in part there's an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit's behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be 'if it's free, you're the product', which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they've figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there's more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.
You're conflating investors, who lent Reddit the money and want a return on it, and spez, who actually runs the business and made those bad decisions. The investors weren't the ones who told spez how to create the return on investment, they merely pressured him to find a way to do so. Do you think Warren Buffett tells Apple how to run things? I'd be surprised if an old fart like him had any say in how iPhones should be designed or how the Apple Store should operate.
I don't think the problem is earning a profit, the problem is the need to earn even more profit than last year. Investors aren't content to buy into a company like Reddit just to let it continue in a steady state. They want to double their money in a few years and then cash out. They don't care if they destroy a valuable service that many people enjoy.
I don't think investors are the ones who told spez how to run things. They likely simply pressured him to make changes as quick as possible to make Reddit profitable. Investors don't usually specify how to generate that profit though, otherwise they'd run their own companies.
Twitter has been around for so long, it takes some time to kill. The latest move to allow access only to verified users together with meta may actually kill it though.
I don't think the problem is so much profitability as it is the demand/expectation for endless growth. It becomes a positive feedback loop and is completely unsustainable after a certain point.
You know what else is endless growth? Cancer.
Yeah this is critical. These promises for money later mean that all sorts of stupid ideas were being funded, and therefore people hired, etc, but now that's coming to a close. Companies and investors will be more likely to scrutinize spending (as they should) and see how to rightsize with reality and line of sight to profit. For significantly more complex reasons, it's similar to an individual borrowing themselves into crazy debt, and banks eventually determining that they need more than credit/promises to keep seeding you cash.
Time to pay back some promises.
That's still the case and high interest rates haven't really fixed that because they are still not high enough. Just look at how any company mentioning "AI" in their earnings call gets extra billions in market cap overnight without having a real product yet.
That rather assumes that it actually matters that VC money is being wasted.
After all it keeps the money in circulation and keeps people employed. They then get paid and will then buy useful things from companies that do make profit, so in the end it all works out. It's only bad for the investors, but that's always been the thing about investment, it's always been a risk, and it's never been guaranteed.
If the goal is simply to keep money circulating and people employed, there are more efficient ways to do that.
Reddit, as a whole only has about 2000 employees.
"only 2000 employees" Reddit should have maybe 200 employees. 2000 is an insane number of people for a single relatively simple piece of software.
Especially since they have free content moderation. What are all those people even doing? They couldn't even keep Victoria for AMA's.
This seems like a non sequitur: what is good about only profitable ventures getting funding? These unprofitable ventures were creating good jobs and providing enjoyable and sometimes useful products to consumers for low prices. So why is it good that funding is drying up?
It doesn’t seem completely crazy to me that it would be better for money to go to successful projects than just be sprayed like a fire hose in hope that you land a Facebook or Google sized moonshot.
Of course it sucks for the people that lose their job, but presumably that money should go towards sustainably growing things where they could work.
No. I don't mean to be rude but most of that message is wrong.
VC Money is very much not drying up. 2023 has seen record rounds in most markets. What is drying up is "VC Money for early stage startups with no revenue, no traction, and barely a functional idea", but even that is not new it has been going on since at least 2018. Remember that guy who raised 1.5M$ with an app that just let you say "Yo" to your contacts ? That was 10 years ago. Those times are dead and buried.
Then the link between VC markets health and interest rates is... contentious to say the least. VCs don't borrow money - they raise funds from family offices and individual investors, every 2 or 3 years. So every change to the financial landscape will have a progressive effect over 3 years, not a brutal one after a few months. Also you have to bear in mind that the people who bankroll VCs are looking for performance of at least 2X over 10 years. Interests would have to go up to 7% to even be in competition with VC investment. Of course there's a psychological aspect to investment so the effet is not ZERO but it's not as automatic as saying "interest go up => vc dry up".
Finally, the companies we are talking about are in vastly different situations and not necessarily looking for VC money. There is no explaining their behaviour with a single cause, what we're seeing is probably a cluster effect, because executives are like fish they always follow the movement of the other fish in their field.
What's left unsaid here (but I'm sure you realize) is that these same users whose monetization is so low also provide most of the content and moderation on the site. When you spread out the value of that among the (human) userbase, the total value returned to Reddit by each human is higher.
Steve thought he was targeting the AI with this move, but in reality he has been charging his most engaged users. If he's upset that Apollo has turned a profit, the correct move was to acknowledge that one guy has done a better job than Reddit's team, not tell all the users that Apollo helped bring to Reddit that they were no longer welcome
I think they're operating under the assumption that there is no shortage of people willing to work for clout on a leading social media. They think the users they lose are replaceable and you know what it's not an unreasonable expectation. It sucks but that's just the way it is, there will always be people willing to post memes and delete nazi comments.
Only time will tell, but it's not uncommon to kick out power users when they get uppity and think they run your platform. Way easier/cheaper to fire unpaid volunteers than tech-bros with Silicon Valley salaries.
I'm not so sure about Google nowadays. What started out as an everyday product killing, ended up as the first of many. They killed Stadia from one day to the other, and then started to basically sell and kill everything that is not massively profitable to the point they sold their domain distribution as well to Squarespace. That does not seem like something a massive monopoly with no regards to investor opinion does.
Well i don't know about that. They still generate 15B$ in profit every quarter. Sure they're losing some growth, but even amid a historic advertising budget bust they are still beating expectations.
When i mentioned their monopolistic position i was talking more specifically about Youtube, but anyway buying and killing off products is standard operating procedure for a company this size on a market this mature. There's nothing alarming about Google's health.
99% of their profit comes from their search engine ad revenue though. Google has only ever had one truly profitable product and the advent of chatgpt, driven by their only true rival in Microsoft, has them scared shitless. They are way behind in the AI department and it's the only thing out their that fundamentally threatens Googles goose with the golden eggs: their search engine.
I mean when you're at that level of profit you're not "scared shitless" of much. Sure they have some risk around AI but i think a global ad market collapse is higher in their list of stuff to be worried about.
Coming back around to the original subject, they are publicly traded anyway so the VC market is not their problem.
Couldn't it be argued that it's a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?
For example reddit and youtube are completely different in terms of the nature of the platform. Could attempting to monetize an average reddit user to the level of those using youtube might be a mistake? Keep in mind that reddit has much lower overhead for keeping the service running.
The mental image I'm going after is a country that exports mainly wheat arguing that its' exports should be valued the same as a country that produces complex electronics. The products are at a different realm of complexity. Commodities should be valued for what they are and not be confused with higly refined products.
You're right it could very much be argued. I mean isn't that the whole underlying question ? I would imagine that anybody who invests in reddit has the assumption that yes, you can monetize comparably to other platforms. Or even cut the pear in half and sit comfortably at 10$/user which would already be a fucking money printer at >400M MAU.
Now whether they are right or wrong in their thesis is anybody's guess. Even after the recent debacle reddit is still in a very good position, but social media is such a clown world that you can never really tell.
Yeah I think with a net income of $60 billion annually Google is a wee bit past needing VC money lol.
Google in panic mode cause they don't know if they'll be able to close their 10M$ round from local VCs 😱
maybe inflation.
just because U don't see a price tag doesnt mean its not there.
if you cant see the product, then you are the product!
the state of wellbeing had never really been that great to start.