Question: People who still frequent Reddit, has it gone back to business as usual or are the protests still having effect?
I haven’t gone back since Apollo shut down, and not planning to, but I am curious.
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I haven’t gone back since Apollo shut down, and not planning to, but I am curious.
There is absolutely no chance that this is the strategy lol
They simply weren't turning a profit (or enough of one to satisfy shareholders), and had to look to cut unprofitable avenues (eg, Apollo doesn't show ads). They came up with a number of users that they were willing to lose if it meant the remaining userbase was profitable. Who knows if they came in under or over that number in the end, but my suspicion is lemmy has cost them more than they thought. The protests reignited development of lemmy mobile apps, which was really the missing component in making lemmy competitive (and why Reddit deliberately only gave devs 30 days notice, otherwise we'd have Apollo-Lemmy already).
But to me, their actions align pretty well with a company preparing for an IPO. The age of "growth at all costs" is over, and they need to start demonstrating a healthy profit. I just won't be any part of it lol
Yeah, tanking your valuation is the exact opposite of you want to do before going public. Not to mention that AFAIK pre-ipo stock buying isn't a thing.
It truly was humorous to hear people with absolutely no business education talk so confidently about how big of a mistake the execs made. As if people with advanced degrees in business and years of experience didn't know exactly what they were doing.
They knew they'd lose a few million subscribers, but they also knew the people they're losing were people that they weren't going to profit off of.
I also had a chuckle at people thinking that the current mod teams were the only people in the world who would be willing to exert control over millions of people for free.
It absolutely is, and there are even companies out there that specialize in private stock sales and trades.