It’s typically best not to use things dependent on wealth to assess age groups. A kid growing up in Hamtramck had very different experiences from a kid growing up in Birmingham Michigan, even though those two areas are only 10 miles apart.

Depends on the cutoff line. But i would typically say Zoomers are too young to remember 9/11 and old enough to have grown up with Marvel movies. Born late 90’s-early 2010’s. 30 is around the cutoff between Millennials and Zoomers so that wwill come down to individuals. But also, generations are pretty suspect as a concept outside of the Baby Boomers since that was an actual charatable phenomen

Amazon has more money than most countries. They can outlast any company in court, or just ban you from their services in the future.

Or you can get a window unit if you want your bedroom cooler in the summer and a heated blanket for the winter for a fraction of the cost. And once again, neither of those options will spy on you or stop working just because Amazon shit the bed 1000 miles away from where you live. My parents have a high end mattress that tilts but it doesn’t need an Internet connection, and cost half the price of this thing. IoT devices are a luxury tax on people too stupid for all their money.

The top 1% of earners in the US made over $1 million last year. I doubt any lemmy users are in that category.

I have a mattress i purchased for $100 of my buddy when he moved out the country. He ordered it online the year before for $400. I can just throw it on the ground and sleep on it no problem when i move. Not sure why a mattress would ever need an Internet connection other than to spy on you

Except it didn’t matter if Blockbuster’s headquarters had a power outage since tour physical VHS from them worked fine where ever you were. Pretty much every major web service uses AWS, so if AWS goes down, so does the Internet.

The author works for business inside. He’s 100 % on board with all the heinous shit tech companies are doing

People have been making web crawlers for the past 30 years. Why do you need to torch an acre of forest to do the same?

It hasn’t been able to thus far, same as every other “free” social media site other than Facebook. The problem is the sheer scale of the data that these sites have to main makes their overhead costs insane. To make profit from those ad spaces would require those ads to be too expensive to justify to the companies. It would be like trying to operate the New Orleans Superdome purely on ad space. The rate would be way too high to for companies advertising to ever get a return on their investment. Reddit can run ads to subsidize their costs, but it will never be viable as a primary revenue stream for them.

I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint. The inky thing Reddit really produces is semi-anonymous data that is tied to an email address. The quality of that data is iffy at best, while they have massive expenses just to keep the site operating. They can charge for their API calls, but they will never be able to use that to generate actual profit since no one will ever pay for it at that price point.

Something like Reddit or twitter are useful if they are owned by powerful individuals or corporations that wish to influence the public. It is worthless as a strictly financial vehicle because it produces no profit and has assets that are not not equal to the cost of maintain them. You would only buy stock in reddit in the hopes that some billionaire thinks they can do a better job running it than Elon Musk did with twitter. Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.

Which takes me back to my original comment about the kitten stomping factory. It gives value to a select group of people with a specific aim, but it is worthless as an investment vehicle because it owns little, produces nothing, and has massive liabilities. If you want to exert power and influence, it’s useful. If you only care about making money, it’s useless. People who buy and sell stock are mostly only interested in making money.

I agree. But propaganda tools typically aren’t publicly traded because they are a venture that requires a lot of expenses but being it little cash value, which is the entire point of the stock market.

How is that any different than what i initially said?

Which will only actually ever benefit anyone that owns massive amounts of the stock. Reddit has few tangible assets other than their data, which is of questionable value at best. It’s basically like owning stock in a piblic library

I didn’t ask about their other shares. I asked how Reddit’s soft power is able to actually benefit shareholders. I understand how it benefits Spez and those who make the actual decisions at reddit, but if I own 400 shares of Reddit, how do i actually benefit since Reddit will never pay a dividend since it will never actually be profitable

I understand that Reddit has value to an individual or small board that can control what is posted to reddit. What i am saying is that Reddit’s value is entirely in soft power and has no actual path to profitablity. If i am Condé Nast then i can benefit from owning reddit. But Reddit will never pay a dividend, so buying stock in the company is worthless unless you are convinced that some idiot will pay more for it down the road.

I understand how stocks work. Reddit stock is just a legitimizes greater fool scam as no one will ever get a dividend or see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it. Reddit is absolutely worthless in an strictly economic sense. It’s value is soley in societial and political ways

Because modern western business is about cashing out the business to squeeze out a couple extra bucks each quarter. They aren’t interested in making a product, just cutting costs, raising prices, and issuing stock buybacks

Ok, so how does a shareholder benefit from that? My company that pays people to stomp on kittens at my kitten stomping factory has value in that in gives people jobs and controls the feral cat population, but it creates no profit for the shareholders.