And no one is surprised.

Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that "free speech" was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on 'free speech' when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.

Worth noting they're not just 'discontinuing' coins and awards - but removing them retroactively.

This Admin comment notes that the awards themselves will be removed, so posts and comments will no longer display the awards they received; it's not just that the feature is being sunset, but all awards will vanish from the site.

There were years there when any watermark from another site would get OP lynched in the comments, and now Admin over there is sufficiently out of touch they're going to start doing it to their own content.

Bets are on that this is a stupid kneejerk test from Reddit, worried that post-migration community hubs are going to "profit from their content" the same way Reddit did to places like ifunny or 9gag during it's entire growth arc.

That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.

I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.

The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on 'rival' platforms.

Like so many of those sorts of decisions, Digg leadership ultimately assumed - incorrectly, to be sure - that their users would "get over it" in time.

They'd had minor revolts over the 2.0 and 3.0 redesigns, they'd had sitewide discontent several times during the 3.0 era due to changes in the content algorithm ... Digg had weathered several storms by that point, and I think site management simply assumed they would continue that trend.

There's a perennial issue I think for Authorities in that sort of position where you're exposed to so much baseless griping and complaining from the extremely-vocal minority that you need to gain some ability to filter out negativity and criticism, or you're crippled by it. You cannot make everyone happy and only the unhappy people will bother to express themselves, so you learn to filter out the discontent and focus on the theory, on the goals. Many times you genuinely know better than this or that upset user, and you take solace from that. But from that position, it's so easy to then also block out the more important negative feedback, the necessary criticisms, under the assumption that 'you know better' - because that's how it went the last ten, hundred, thousand, times this sort of thing came up.

Which is IMO a lot of what happened to the whole of Upstairs staff at Reddit. They got so used to users complaining and users being upset about this or that little thing that they had to develop a certain amount of resistance to that feedback - but they've reached a point where they're so resistant to all feedback about their site that they wound up losing touch with the site and its users.

I think a huge part of where Reddit went wrong and will continue to is not having and/or listening to people on staff who are skilled and qualified at simply understanding site users and site user culture. So much of their current issues could have been avoided if they had a person in a leadership position, an equal at the C Suite table, whose whole and total responsibility was understanding the users and speaking 'for' them accurately - representing them as if they're stakeholders in the company.

I think it's worth addressing that "the right people" are very often going out of their way to be absolutely unreachable by the average joe and are completely impossible for mere poors to meaningfully bother directly. Protest will always inconvenience average people first, because the little people are always affected more than the rich in any action, especially any that would manage to rattle the powerful in any way.

The powerful have managed to structure society and laws alike to make effectively all actions that would target them directly and spare the average joe from any collateral overspill either impractical - or significantly more illegal than protest actions that cast a broader net. The idea from the powerful is to ensure that protest must affect other citizens in order to reach them, and can't just target them directly. Targeting them, alone, is harassment, or trespass on private property, or ... etc.

I recognize this cycle from the early days of reddit~!

1. Story takes over frontpage.
2. People make posts complaining about the story taking over the front page.
3. Next up: posts complaining about the posts complaining about a story taking over the frontpage.

Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch ...

"Just be yourself!"

No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.

This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they're right - you can't fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you're not isn't going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it's never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.

None of those grown-ups were like "Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don't spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game."

That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just ... didn't occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being 'fake' in order to build an equally-fake relationship.

It took a friend's brother taking me aside to make it 'click' - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like "So the whole object is all 'real you' yeah? But any time you're talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that's facing you. It's all you, it's all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don't sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that's what's on your mind that day."

lmao that is such a good descriptor of what's going on there. Elon figured he could make money from racists wanting to be racist around normal people.

UPS is being UPS here.

They're abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn't pay.

The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the 'debt', or the new packages that keep showing up.

"We're getting paid to put paint on the wall."

I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.

I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.

The thing there is that like ... it's not about consistency or values. The fact that he lied is meaningless to him, throwing it in his face is wasted effort. Communication is a tool to get what he wants, not a goal unto itself.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one's yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one's mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren't quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We'd get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who'd been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and ... shit started going downhill. The couple weren't bad. Their friends weren't bad. Their friends' friends were awful. I didn't like the new crowd's vibe, I didn't like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn't get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn't want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone's patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we'd built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn't drop the grudge and didn't see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn't want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy "why are you here?" old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections ... to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends' defense - we had agreed we'd make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn't have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I'd never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad's charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn't care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I've connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don't think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don't want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn't. I took the low road and went behind my friends' backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult's perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn't concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn't a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room ... I just didn't like how there was more of "them" than "us" and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

It didn't host child porn, but when it was shut down part of the statements Reddit gave was that they had found users of the sub were using the comments sections of /jailbait to meet like-minded people, and then were using Reddit DMs to arrange exchanges off-platform - that likely did involve CP.

It was well-known and indisputable that child porn was posted to that community not infrequently, but was being removed by mods when detected. That's why Admin liked ViolentAcrez - he ran the community specifically to prevent it from being worse. The other allegation from that era was that the community routinely featured submissions of scantily-clothed minors who had also appeared in nude image sets, as unremoved content, and the comments sections would reflect that.

I think it's completely reasonable to frame that community as "dedicated to actual CP" for all that they weren't hosting it directly. The same way that /r/Piracy is dedicated to pirating digital content, but doesn't host links to piracy because that would be against TOS. The only reason Jailbait didn't host CP directly was the fact that as you note, the FBI would have shut that shit down in a heartbeat - if not for the illegality, that's absolutely what their main content would have been.

So much of what that community was up to had been openly known and discussed by the wider reddit community for years prior to the media attention that eventually pushed Reddit to shut them down.

There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the "display name" selected later would appear to other users on the site.

Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as "display names" don't seem to have ever been served via the API.

To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was "extravagant_mustard_924" and not "Cool Dude Brian" or whatever they'd put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that's one of the best changes they've made in ages and I'm glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it's been an occasional frustration to hit 'hide' by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.

Very much so.

If this coin's math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor ... it'll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that's explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.

Yeah - as of about thirty minutes ago, Apollo just crashes as soon as it boots.

Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.

They can already access the data, it's all federated and it's all publically available effectively by definition, they don't need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don't think that's really why they chose to federate.

But...

What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.

Facebook & Instagram's primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don't tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren't joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.

If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren't necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there's already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there's already content to consume and people to interact with.

Yeah there's two 'main' kinds of people who want a platform where users are able to post hate speech and reach "everyone" with it.

• People who want to be hateful and want access to the targets of their hate. They want to upset people, they want to 'own the libs' or be able to toss slurs at minorities, and those things are unrewarding for them if they don't get to see how upset they've made their targets.

• People who want to recruit people to being hateful. They want to convince normal people to share their prejudices and their biases, they want "debates" or would like to share "statistics" and are seeking a soapbox that can reach people who might find their views convincing.

This is a huge part of why defederation works, why platforms like Voat or Gab rarely thrive for very long. Being hateful in an echo chamber towards people who are outside the room is rarely fun for those folks, and very often results in in-fighting and fragmenting of the movement. Moderates and 'normies' are driven off because now they're a target rather than a participant or spectator.

My understanding was that the traditional chilis used were Thai or birds-eye chilis, and ripe red jalapenos were used by immigrants to North America when thai chilis weren't available. The "sriracha pepper" is a modern invention to capitalize on the popularity of the sauce, rather than the source of it - and it is still just a close relative of the jalapeno.

Ironically, they're not.

At least, not yet. InterestingAsFuck is still unmoderated and has submissions disabled.

There's a feeding frenzy over in RedditRequest rn, but other than that the subs where Admin intervened in modlists are effectively shut down while Admin figures out how to unfuck the fuckery.

As long as they honor what people have currently bought,

From the announcement, this is a "yes, but also no" because any unused coins on an account stop being honoured after Sep 12, when there will no longer be awards to purchase with them.

Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.

Reading history ... that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it's ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism's gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the 'common' population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.

The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it's very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers' seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.

So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.

Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.

There's been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren't coming to our spaces. Mods will post "going to Discord, fuck this place" and they're like "it's temporary, Discord isn't a forum".

I always thought the "ice floes" was just figurative, but apparently there actually used to be ice there! TIL~!

Won't accomplish anything - mods can't delete the content itself, just remove the listing from public display. All that has to happen is run a script reversing post removals by [moderator XYZ] between [time period] and the sub is restored; IIRC they've used similar tools, or methods, in the past when a mod has gone rogue and tried to kill a community with the same methodology.

Except that's a sidestep. The viewpoint you were defending was saying that this one specific option, that has substantial academic backing for positive outcomes for kids, should not happen or should be prohibited.

That's not "discuss other options" - that's discussing this option and arguing that society should take it away.

That you're now trying to argue that it's just discussion and it's reasonable debate and - forgive my bluntness - being openly dishonest about what the original speech was that you're defending with "free-speech" and anti-censorship talking points is like ... the example case for how this thread started. The nazis and the transphobes and the hateful bigots can always, easily, spin their own takes as righteous and reasonable debate - if you let them lead the dialogue and frame their discourse through the most-appealing lenses possible. And they can make valid-sounding and appealing arguments for why you, too, should defend them and their right to speak.

But inevitably they are also going to use any and all space you clear for them to be hateful and bigoted and call for harm to other people - that is their goal. Everything else is just a setup play.

I think that the Pao plot arc always planned on bringing Spez back.

Reddit - especially then - had a sort of reverence for the OG founders and discussion would often model them as the "real" redditors and people who really understood the community, changes since they sold were blamed on corporate interests and people were forever complaining that "shit like this wouldn't happen if ..." various founders or original staff were still around. I think it was always misplaced, but it was the culture at the time.

So Pao was brought in as a scapegoat - she was going to make wildly unpopular changes, take the heat, take a dive, and be replaced. She'd get a fat bag, an absolutely glowing reference on her CV, and a huge jump in her career - then Reddit would bring in the popular original founder that redditors liked and respected, and everyone would feel optimistic again. The changes would remain, the community would feel like they'd got their pound of flesh, that they had been appeased, and the site could get back on track.

Don't get me wrong, he's been a hack all along, he's been willing to sell his values to the highest bidder pretty much all along.

And now Spez is playing the same role. He's taking the face position and eating the heat over a bunch of shitty corporate boardroom decisions - that he definitely was party to - in order to inflate the IPO valuation and his cut of the cash. They're going to try and make it look profitable enough and healthy enough that someone else takes the hot potato and then make for the goddamn hills once they're not bagholding anymore.

my family can euthanize me even if I object?

No.

There's no law that allows killing of the unwilling; even a living will addressing assisted suicide or euthanization due to incapability assumes that you would still consent at the later date, but lack either physical or intellectual ability to communicate that. If you can clearly communicate that you've changed your mind, they have to respect that, even if that changed mind has reduced capability due to dementia.

Your best hope would be to go with assisted suicide while you still have enough faculties to make the decision and execute on your portions of the act.

They really should be talking about how these changes are going to be affecting reddit's sources of information.

Yeah. Protest and discourse on reddit about these changes and their impact on the site and its communities has been unfortunately domineered and nearly hijacked by the mods leading the protests. That has meant the average user has a hard time understanding how their experience will be affected - and made it incredibly easy for Reddit Inc to spin the conflict as "between Admin and Moderation, with users being caught in the crossfire" - instead of being about the changes and consequences of cutting API access to all users' experience on the site.

Admin over there has weaponized the userbase' underlying distrust for mods against the protest as a whole, and a large number of mods have fed that perception by acting unilaterally with regards to protest actions.

Do we know he did nothing for years, though? Like, I'm not checking /jailbait is still up on Internet Archive to see how long he was on their mod roster, I don't want to end up on that list, but I've never seen anything that indicates he remained on their list for any particular amount of time.

Didn't do shit about the community as an Admin, for sure. That took way too long from all of Reddit. But that's also separate from the recent narrative that he stayed as a mod for rather a while or was a willing and active mod there.

This would make excellent satire, but it's pretty dismal journalism.

Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

Speak for yourself, please.

Many millennials who 'work on the internet' have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

And that's still true - it's just less and less likely to include someone's twitter in that assessment.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called "change" occurred and it's no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. [...] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They're doing it all over again; and in ten years we'll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.

In that vein, it's very much worthwhile to take the time to write a review explaining why the app sucks. It legitimately does, and I'd have been far less annoyed about the initial API change if the app they're trying to force folks to use wasn't so goddamned awful.

Then ... leave out the API stuff, the Reddit corporate bullshit, Apollo or RIF - Apple will scrub review-bombing from Apps' pages, and mentions of drama or competitors makes it easy to target those reviews.

The issue there is that it's kind of like saying "the only way to fix society is if everyone followed the law" - it places all assessments of success behind a nearly impossible standard. It also places all responsibility for that success solely onto mods putting their own interests ahead of their communities and/or the interest that brought them to volunteer as mods.

I participated in the protest, I'm here because of them, I facilitated protest actions within 'my' communities that wanted to protest - but I don't think there was a world where mods alone could bring the site to its knees and force Reddit to backpedal. If anything - I think that any hope of dramatic action causing change died on the spot the moment the protest became "about mods" and users experienced the protest as something mods were doing to communities in order to reach Reddit.

So many mods acted unilaterally to shutter communities and the impact of that approach cultivated reddit's existing anti-mod sentiments to fuel opposition to the protests and the cause. The vast bulk of people I saw trolling in protest subs, or arguing against protest in my own subs, were users who already had a history of disliking "reddit mods" as a significant theme in their account history.

But to average users, their shit and their communities and the things they like about reddit were being "taken away" by mods in a dispute between mods and Reddit. The hijack of messaging around the API to be about modding and about how much harder it'd be and how the API changes would affect mods - meant that users were also indirectly being told this was an issue that didn't affect them if they didn't use the apps affected.

The only dramatic impact that would have swayed Reddit Inc and won the matter was a fairly unanimous buy-in from the average user, a clear unified front, and a dramatic drop in user engagement. As long as they have the data showing that people are showing up and are using the site and are interested in using the site, they can deal with the interruptions to major communities and pull more compliant volunteers from the users that remain.

Was this written by GPT?

Profitable, from a VC stance, is a company that generates more money than it must spend on its operating expenses.

If they are reinvesting revenue is that profitable or not? You seem to think not but why not?

Yes. What you're choosing to do with your profit is a separate question, but you have generated funds above and beyond operating expenses that can be reinvested.

Depending on the scale and focus on the business, in some cases, some R&D or growth investment is necessary as part of "operating expenses" while in others it isn't.

If they were instead just giving dividends to shareholders, or amassing cash, would that be more profitable?

In this case profitable is "yes" or "no" - not a sliding scale of greys. If they are able to make dividends or stockpile cash, they are also profitable.

I don't think I jive with the notion that kbin is somehow "above" hating Nazis.