Funny how much support these companies need: waivers for environmental and zoning issues, noise and use variances, incentives and tax breaks, special protections, benefits, or exceptions their lobbiests arranged, artificially low minimum wages, artificially high prices, bailouts, special bankruptcy protections, tax laws written just for them, tariffs on international competition, etc etc etc etc etc.

On top of which, various forms of wage theft cost more than all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined, and it’s almost never prosecuted (or only in a superficial fines-only way, with no admission of guilt and no jail time). And the exact same thing happens with undocumented labor.

And on top of that is the rollback of hard-won worker protections: states rolling back child labor laws, states saying kids don’t need meal breaks, states saying people working outdoors in extreme heat don’t need water breaks, etc etc etc etc.

Of course, if you ask the owner, or the CEO, or other people who are benefiting from this system, they’ll tell you all about how “they built it with their own hands, from the ground up, with no help from anyone else” …

Well, spez and the COO sold over a million shares. I thought they’d be tied down by some kind of lock-in period.

spez doesn’t care, be just wanted the money for his doomsday bunker.

“I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”

If I wanted Facebook shitposts and forwards from KlanMa, I’d’ve joined Facebook. And I don’t believe Meta has good intentions, I believe they want to overwhelm the fediverse, and I believe they want to make money. Middle-manager Cottle and their team may have good intentions, but corporate certainly doesn’t, and I certainly don’t trust their users.

I feel like something changed

He grew up a rich white boy in full-Apartheid South Africa. He’s never grown up (Tesla models S,3,X,Y! Tesla fart noises! 42069 amirite!).

Nothing changed, he just got bored and started interacting with the poor’s and people noticed the person he really was.

It was pretty obvious that Trump would try to scam Musk. Fortunately, given his own difficulties, Musk was unlikely to agree - we’re just fortunate these bills are coming due so far in advance of the election. And also that, given Musk’s foreign birth, he’ll never be eligible to be president or vice president (something that I’m sure sticks in his craw).

Lmao, I was thinking more about how fractious reddit is even without provocation, but you’re right, too!

users could become unruly if Reddit stock falls below the IPO price.

Lmao, dude doesn’t know redditors at all, do they?

He’s literally trying to build up and stock his doomsday bunker.

I think what they stated was that they spent $400 on R&D in 2023 - you know, the year where, after 20 years of twiddling their thumbs and doing shit-all, depending on volunteers to run the site, and RES and 3rd party apps to make it usable, and imgur to provide hosting, etc etc - the year when they finally had to actually do some real coding.

I’m wondering how much of 2023’s R&D was spurred by restricting the API code, and then allowing certain applications access; having to finally take seriously their decade-old promise to develop mod tools with no planning or preparation; their total surprise at having to provide access to disabled people; and having to update their app. Those are all areas where they were extremely happy to let languish, and which they suddenly had to provide expedited support for after the protests.

Spez is trying to outfit his doomsday bunker and wants the cash.

For the communities I participated in, I usually hung out in /new, not /rising. There was absolutely hate speech going on: the troll and influencer accounts also hung out in /new, trying to get their comments in early enough to be read by anyone else entering the thread. It’s particularly noticable late at night, when more of the US is asleep and more of Asia / Russia is awake.

This is actually what I think Huffman’s biggest weakness as a CEO is. CEOs are supposed to be forward-thinking, coming in ahead of or on top of the next new wave. But Huffman sees an exciting new tech trend, waits until it gets big and then tries to cash in on it. He didn’t start reddit crypto until crypto was at it’s peak. He didn’t do reddit NFTs until they were peaking. He didn’t try to do reddit video until after TikTok was huge. He only shut the API door after he’d paid all the bandwidth and infrastructure cost to transfer all of reddit’s valuable user commentary to multiple AI companies, including some of the richest corporations in the world. He absolutely fucking sucks as a CEO.

He wants the money for his doomsday bunker.

They don’t. But the dot-com frenzy where people threw money at anything tech-related is long over, and investment firms aren’t going to give lots of money to a barely-profitable business with a long history of bad decisions. Oh, they’ll buy some stock but it’s not going to be the massive frenzy Huffman desperately wants. He’s going to take whatever he gets and work on his doomsday bunker, and reddit will continue to contribute to the enshittification of both the internet, and society in general.

Archive link.

Remember that Hitler had an unsuccessful coup attempt before getting into full power.

Also, they’ve only caught like half the people who were there.

Oh - and I also forgot to mention that, even in the current ‘slow’ period, the US is still averaging over 100 covid deaths per day. And that also means that we’re averaging an additional 1500 people with long covid every day.

While they mention the number of people who retired during the pandemic, they failed to mention the million or so who died, the tens of millions with long covid, and the family and friends who are now helping out those who are disabled and can’t pick up shifts they might have covered before.