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On the other hand, he already cashed out once and was wrong, so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Huffman
I don't think that he's had a whole lot of faith in Reddit as a business since early-on.
Mission accomplished! Those undeniably shitty apps definitely were launched.
I've never used them, but IIRC they acquired some third-party client and then just modified them. "Blue Alien" or something like that?
googles
"Alien Blue", at least for the official iOS app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue
I dunno what the history of the Android app is.
That being said, they're responsible for what they acquire, just saying that a lot of that might not be developed in-house.
They acquired Alien Blue, but what they put out under “Reddit” was not Alien Blue in the least bit. They basically bought it to kill it. I had Alien Blue. :(
Hey, acquiring another app and launching it as your own app is still launching it! What would they have done without spez?
Alien Blue was fucking awesome, too. Those ass-butts.
This is redundant. That's why we put caps on them and call em ass-hats
My favorite way to visualize the meaning of "asshat": the person is such a sad waste of human life that their entire upper body is effectively just a hat for their posterior.
Then he wasn't wrong. Never has made money.
Well, you wouldn't expect it to in the growth phase.
A lot of consumer-facing Internet companies have a large portion of their costs be fixed costs. That is, a programmer or QA guy costs the same amount whether you have ten users or ten million users. But your revenue is linear in your userbase size. So you really don't want to be a small company, if you fit that profile.
The idea is to burn money and grow rapidly to the point where your fixed costs are relatively small. It makes no sense to try to generate profit if you lose growth for it.
That's especially true for social media companies, because for them, network effect is a major factor -- the value of the network is something like the square of the number of users.
So you really want to be big, not small.
So the solution is to grow quickly, lose money during that period, then adjust and monetize the userbase when you can't afford to burn money growing any more.
That transition to a profitable state after a money-losing growth state usually means that a company is gonna do something unpopular (since they're optimizing for something other than appeal) and what Corey Doctorow was complaining about as "enshittification".
The fact that Reddit lost money during the growth phase doesn't mean that it was a failure -- that would have been intended, part of the business model.
Now, if it's losing money once the growth phase is done, that could be another story.
I ain't broke baby, I am just in my growth phase
It's old enough to vote. Or serve in the US military.
Or attend college as a non-genius.
I'm familiar with growth stage. 18 to 19 years seems like a long one. Web 2.0 happened years ago.