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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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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".
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.
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 Embedded 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 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.
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.