Reddit is going to have their IPO. Anybody can buy shares. With enough shares, a shareholder resolution could be proposed and passed. Similar shareholder activism has forced Fortune 500 companies to divest from fossil fuels. We could replace corporate execs at will and have major site changes be put to a site-wide vote. This is something that could stop eshitification dead in its tracks. What’s more, the improved user experience would make Reddit the #1 place for social media period, which means more user engagement, which means more ability to sell ads and keep the platform afloat.
Federation is great, and there should be many Lemmy instances, but it does not solve problems of funding and management. We need user-managed, user-owned platforms, or they will all suffer the same fates.
What am I missing here?
What you’re missing is that you’ll drive up the price. You’d be validating everything Spez did by turning it into a reason people want to buy Reddit.
It’s going to be bought anyways by speculative investors. The only difference is who buys it. The market has an as-of-yet-unknown price it will buy those shares at. Even in the scenario you describe where demand from redditors drives up the price, if the end goal is achieved of having a user-owned platform, I’d still consider it a win.
No, the difference is how happy spez and the investors are with his decisions. If his decisions cause the share price to rise, then obviously (in their view), he’d be right.
What am I missing here?
You want to beat the system by following the system. Al, that it achieves will be ‘told you so it would result in millions?’
The only real way to beat a failing system is by offering something better and thus making it obsolete. The fediverse is an attempt to do just that.
Mastodon is getting more and more attention now Musk is killing Twitter. (Truth is getting some as well, but that’s limited to extremist christians) I’m sure Lemmy and Kbin will be as effective.
How are you going to pull together ~$5 billion to buy Reddit and keep it running long enough to get through its burn rate until you make it profitable?
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”
At the rate spez is devaluing the company, we ought to be able to buy a controlling stake for peanuts before they even go public.
But the bigger question is why we’d want to.
