This was my biggest wtf.
Companies like reddit used to love that shit - make something awesome to get a massive audience… And THEN monetize. So what the hell is he talking about “business”?
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not everything has to be a buisness.
This is the part that Silicon Valley doesn’t get. We can, do, and need good things that don’t make money.
Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Princeali311@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It isn’t even that it doesn’t need to make money. It’s that it doesn’t need to keep making more money than it did last year. It’s okay to have “stagnant” growth. It’s okay to just keep doing well rather than keep increasing profits.
tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They need to make some money - infrastructure isn’t free, employees need paid, etc. they should be self sustaining.
They don’t need to be 2009-Google profitable though. That pipe dream needs to end. 3-5% YoY growth is plenty.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Or, how about a simple nonprofit that charges a nominal fee for access to high quality maps? That way there’s no risk of them abusing their position to please advertisers.
tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The idea that non-profits aren’t profiting-seeking is the biggest misunderstanding in the world. I work for a large one, and it’s absolutely the same rampant penny-squeezing 30%-unsustainable-growth-seeking monstrosity as anything in the Valley. The pittance that gets thrown to “charitable causes” is just another tax dodge in an otherwise profit-demanding venture. Swap “shareholders” with “the endowment” and there’s no difference at all.
Much better to be a for-profit company with a charter demanding where profits in excess of modest growth targets are spent internally.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s too bad. I’d be interested to see some statistics about how customer experience is, on average, with non-profits vs private companies vs public companies. Maybe it’s still a net win even if there are awful non-profits
yuki2501@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The problem is that for the number of users, a centralized platform is terrible at scaling. This is why they seek advertising revenue so much.
The only efficient way to solve this problem is by decentralizing, which is what Lemmy’s doing.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Eh, kinda, but I see Lemmy as multiple centralized services, not actually decentralized. All of the content I view is stored on my instance, even if it was created elsewhere. This means it’s going to have issues scaling because there will be a ton of copies of everything throughout the fediverse.
A properly decentralized service won’t have so much duplication, it’ll have just enough redundancy so it’s not at risk of failure if too many nodes fail.
ugjka@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They want 100 million $ houses on beaches that’s why they are going after an IPO. The whole idea that they are not making money is laughable