Fark => Digg => Reddit => Lemmy
I think the deeper generational thing is in the idea that anything “just works”. Like I’m a programmer, right, so I know shortcuts. Ctrl+S saves the file, simple right?
Me when I want to save a file: Ctrl+SSSS. Why? Because I don’t trust it “just works”. Same reason I don’t trust auto save. Same reason I am stunned every time I tell windows to diagnose and fix the network problem and then it actually does.
I grew up in a time where you couldn’t trust any of that shit.
Twitter was purchased at 44 billion in late 2022. It did not cost Twitter 44 billion to run for the years prior. That is very much profit for those shareholders considering especially that 44 billion was a significant percentage higher than the value at the time. It cost less than half a billion to keep Twitter’s lights on every quarter. They started in 2006. So assuming from the get go it cost half a billion a quarter (and you know it didn’t right?) … that’s 32 billion to run Twitter the years it was open. And they sold for 44 billion, meaning 12 billion in profit in a windfall.
Still following?
And for a social media company’s primary shareholders, selling that company is the ultimate goal and only way to realize true profits. That’s the social media scam. Zuckerberg right? You think he wants to run Facebook? He has to, he’s an employee at this rate. Well compensated sure but he doesn’t pull the strings.
What’s hilarious is Elon didn’t understand all that. He bought Twitter for cash money. There is no way on God’s green earth he manages to turn a profit with it because no social media company has been able to either - not with an entire board and public stock, so certainly not with a private company either. All the profit mechanisms they had before were contingent on the stock market, on speculation. That’s all gone now. It’s private. There is no public stock price to affect.
He didn’t create it. Huffman was always a tag along. He is happy to take credit for all the things he didn’t do.
Aaron Swartz’ story gets more and more sad with every passing year.
Twitter made 44 billion dollars. Pretty sure it didn’t cost that much to run. Ergo Twitter made money.
That’s the big hurdle. That’s the big catch. Social media companies are contingent on speculation to drive profits. Facebook isn’t worth what it is without speculative buying in the markets. Twitter, same story. That’s where reddit is at, they want a payday and to move on. The funny thing is this same reasoning exposes just how awful a businessman Elon Musk is. Twitter is going to literally drive him from the top ten richest in the world list all on its own. Give it time.
The funnier thing is Steve Huffman is such a loser he is looking up to Elon in this past week. The guy wants so desperately to be able to buy popularity like Elon did.
I mean why couldn’t there be a dedicated service that indexes everything? Whoever makes it and gets it working in a user friendly manner is going to have a significant level of control on the content that is shown in the results. If you don’t want it, it isn’t indexed. I don’t have to stretch the imagination to think of parties that have good reason to want to be first to do that across Activity Pub as a whole. Mastodon is already a big frontrunner in that regard.
really the only thing I found on reddit that wasn’t readily available elsewhere was “how to get X game to run in a particular way” or something equally inane.
While it’s a vast collection of advice and such, I think it’s debatable whether it’s good. It’s also a bastion of fascism and the admins seem to be encouraging it. I would argue reddit themselves played as big a role in promoting the Trump campaign and presidency as Twitter did. Maybe bigger, because it gave them a marshalling platform.
All in all I don’t think it’s even a close decision, the plusses outweigh the minuses by a lot.
Honestly is it all that sad? In a way it’s beautiful.
Buddhist monks spend weeks or months constructing sand mandalas on the stone floors of a temple, only to sweep it up immediately upon finishing it. They are beautiful works of art, but their real value to the monks lies in the process of their creation. What reason is there to hold on to it? Instead, take the lessons learned and bring those with you, go forth and create new mandalas more exquisite than before.
I just deleted well over 10 million words from my comment history, many things I’ve read over and over and many I never thought about again. I’m still the same person, in fact I’m stronger for it. No need to hold on to the past.
“I thought you was corn”. I say it whenever I startle someone.
My highschool days. Wouldn’t change a thing either, except I wouldn’t start smoking cigarettes.