This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they’re still fine.

Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you’re printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.

The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It’s all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.

That’s Silicon Valley’s MO. Just half a year ago, people were putting crypto BS in their products.

Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.

We can please not bring the “we did it Reddit!” culture to Lemmy?

Reddit is a privately held company. Their valuation is falling because someone at Fidelity arbitrarily said so. Right now, given the current economic trends, almost every consumer tech company is taking a beating (Discord, Substack, etc), so in the larger context Reedit’s drop in valuation is expected and smart money is expecting it to rise once the economy becomes hot and more investors have money to risk on consumer companies.

The biggest value of a social media is the influence it has on culture and society as a whole, which is why advertisers want to get in on the action (think of Facebook influencing elections). Engaging on the platform and even constantly talking about the platform is a great sign of it’s lasting influence.

So no, spending an hour putting pixels on r/place is not a great way to stick it to Reddit. Constantly talking about Reddit and basically giving it free ad-space and mind share on Lemmy also does not stick it to Reddit. The original poster is correct: best thing is a blank canvas.

And ignore all the click-bait articles about how Reddit is going to fall any day now. They all basically play on your wishful thinking for clicks, they aren’t based on reality.

If you were a company, you might think twice before advertising on a site that has their users actively, publicly, and loudly trashing on the CEO.

Isn’t this just wishful thinking? Let’s be 100% real for a moment, those people posting fuck spez on r/place aren’t doing it because they’re moving or have moved to an alternative, they’re doing it because they are addicted to Reddit and can’t stop using it. The true protest is moving to an alternative like Lemmy.

If I’m an advertiser, all I see is a very captive audience. This isn’t like the Twitter situation, where your ads will be shown to increasingly objectionable content. In fact, with all the users begrudgingly downloading the official Reddit app, the value of advertising on Reddit may be going up not down.

That being said, Reddit has never been a good place for advertising outside of a few niches, and that hasn’t changed, so in the long run Reddit most likely won’t survive. But in the short run, I don’t think this is the victory lap.

But none of that affects the amount of money they lose.

In fact the CEO of the parent company has been pretty transparent about cost cutting, and I’d bet 30m is probably the lowest yearly losses for Tumblr.

I know people want to make this a moral victory, like the losses are the result of bad community management for Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr but that’s just not true. They were dumpster fires business-wise before they shat on their community, and they were dumpster fires after.

No one has cracked the code on how to make a profitable social media company. The two choices are either community funded (like the Fediverse), or steal all the data like Meta, and arguably the second option isn’t really an option for anyone because Meta would eat your lunch all day everyday.

Could’ve fooled me. I got mine for the temperature control and the goose neck spout. Going strong for 3-4 years now.

Wouldn’t any automated system ideally escalate to the next tier of (human) support when it detects something complicated?

Though I agree with you, I don’t think LLMs are lay-off 90% good.

How many of these billboard/muni and bart ads are by companies who end up failing?

It really seems like the billboard/transit ad is perfect for founders with too much money and not enough marketing sense.