• Sordid
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      42 years ago

      Right? How the hell is a company that has never managed to turn a profit worth more than $0?

        • Grimlo9ic
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          22 years ago

          Mark Hanna: Number one rule of Wall Street. Nobody - and I don’t care if you’re Warren Buffet or if you’re Jimmy Buffet - nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles. You know what a fugazi is?

          Jordan Belfort: Fugayzi, it’s a fake.

          Mark Hanna: Fugayzi, fugazi. It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real.

          https://youtu.be/wM6exo00T5I?t=108

      • cowvin
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        12 years ago

        Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.

        As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.

      • JohnEdwa
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        12 years ago

        If you buy a house with a loan and pay it back, you haven’t turned a profit either - but you do now own a house that has a theoretical value. That’s basically how these things work, investing everything on growing the company in the hopes that some day what they have built can start creating profit, or be sold to someone who thinks they can.

        • @[email protected]
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          02 years ago

          A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under. It’s not about making profit. Companies don’t have value outside of making a profit. Now that I type that I see they actually can have value. Such as political sway or if it’s a company that has some value beyond money, like education or taking care of the needy. But you’d have to find someone willing to sink money into them simply because they find value beyond money.

          • JohnEdwa
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            12 years ago

            A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under

            But that doesn’t mean you can turn a profit from it, or even break even. If you want to do that you have to sell it to someone, and there are multiple reasons why you might not be able to - maybe you spent too much money renovating it and now nobody wants to pay that much. Maybe a bunch of new housing was built and the value crashed. Maybe Detroit happened and the location and land it sits in is literally worthless and nobody wants to live there. - until you actually find a buyer for it all houses have only a theoretical value, as do all companies.

        • Sordid
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          22 years ago

          I get that, but who would want to buy a company that’s never been profitable? It smacks of a scam. “Hey, bro! Buy my company! It never managed to make any money for me, but it’ll be highly profitable for you!” Sounds like the company founder is looking to pull a fast one and laugh all the way to the bank while their investor is left holding the bag.

          The only way I can see this working is if the idea is to build a large user base by offering a good user experience, i.e. not monetizing the platform very much, just enough so that it barely pays for its own operating costs. Then you sell that user base to someone else for the express purpose of shoving tons of ads down everyone’s throat. In that case it’s still a fast one, only in this scenario the users are the victims. But even then I’m skeptical. If that’s the plan, why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?

          • JohnEdwa
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            22 years ago

            why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?

            Because it’s a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself - as we are currently seeing with how wonderfully incompetent Spez is with Reddit.
            When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013 - only to sell it for $3 million in 2019 - was Tumblr bringing in millions and millions of profit? No. But Yahoo thought that they would be able to make it.
            Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, it hasn’t turned any profit either (and never will enough for him to get his moneys worth, but that’s just because Musk is an idiot).

            But yeah, quite often it does feel like a scam. Or kinda like… gambling? You hope someone will pay a lot for your company, while they hope they can make it turn wildly profitable, both may or may not come true.

            • Sordid
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              12 years ago

              it’s a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself

              That’s pretty much what I said, though. That’s the core of the scam. You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that. Maybe I’m just extremely ignorant and naive in matters of business, but selling a fake company like that seems no different than selling pyrite to someone who can’t tell it apart from gold.

              • @[email protected]
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                02 years ago

                You’re basically assuming that the company can’t be made to turn a profit, in which case, yes, it would be a scam.

                But that’s not the case. The company could potentially be made to make a profit, and you’re basically selling that potential. It often works out, like in the case of Amazon. Sometimes it doesn’t, like Yahoo buying Tumblr.

                As long as what the prospective buyer is actually getting is clear and up-front, it can hardly be a scam. With your “You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that.”, you’re essentially assuming the company can’t be made profitable, and that the seller knows that, but doesn’t disclose it to the buyer, and that the buyer is somehow naive enough to not be able to tell.

                It’s generally unlikely that a company can’t be made profitable, it would be unlikely for the seller to know that, and it would be unlikely for the buyer to be unable to find out before buying it, which altogether, makes it unlikely this would happen. Which is why it’s big news when it does happen, like with Theranos (Which was eventually found out)

                • Sordid
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                  12 years ago

                  If the company can be made profitable, why isn’t it? Why wouldn’t the current owner rake in some profits before selling? Surely a company that is already profitable would be even more attractive for buyers.

          • luna
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            12 years ago

            Profits don’t matter under capitalism, it’s only stock money. Trying to profit is a death sentence in the tech space, as we’re all seeing right now. This system doesn’t work for the 21st century

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    Is there a reason discord is also being devalued? I haven’t heard of anything negative going on there and they seem to be doing fine.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          Agree, personally. Nitro ads are getting more intrusive too. I understand they have to monetize somehow, but I wish it were handled based on server population rather than blanket spread to all clients. I don’t participate in any huge servers because notification suppression sucks in Discord. The servers I do use are mostly sub 50 users, and as such don’t consume anywhere near as many resources as some of these mega servers out there.

          • iAmTheTot
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            02 years ago

            notification suppression sucks in Discord

            How so? I’m part of several large servers and they’re all no notifications.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              Because it’s basically all or nothing. And even then, Admins can do notification blasts that override user settings. I want more granular control so I can basically subscribe to specific content in specific channels I interact with rather than broad notification settings.

  • gillrmn
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    12 years ago

    I doubt it is related to migration. It is too soon to have any data on that affect and by numbers it is not much of affect either. The only cost factor of migration that can be done before next quarter release would be increased costs in future dur to moderation, but even that would be very subjective. This is probably due to increased interest rate scenario as feds have said they will bring inflation to 2% so there will be more increase. Hence lowering of cost and spend by companies on advertising and marketing.

  • milkytoast
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    02 years ago

    it’s almost like not listening to your users doesn’t end well

  • Pandantic
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    22 years ago

    (Worth noting that the vast majority of markdown in the value of Reddit and Discord holdings by Fidelity predominantly occurred last year.)

    Oh, that means there’s more room to move down.

  • Holos620
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    12 years ago

    Reddit has very little intrinsic value. Its value comes from its userbase and isn’t Reddit’s to own.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 years ago

    It’s almost like loudly announcing contempt for your userbase is not good for a website where virtually 100% of their value is derived from the loyalty of their users