You think people who currently pay will stop paying?
Like, it's some sort of virtue signalling?
If he's changed to that model presumably he doesn't care about his following but instead wants to make a living (or make himself rich, depending how things are for him).
You believe that? Dude banked on both the sale and takeover, plus the ad revenue when he was running the site.
He had no alternative but to push the poverty myth (Kevin Rose@Digg also did this). Can you imagine what the users would do if he disclosed how much he was raking in?
My guess? $10 million n/w post sale, most likely much more.
> whose attempts to monetize users through advertising have correlated strongly with loss of users.
I don't know if that's true, or how strong the correlation is, but if it's there and you as a founder can detect it before others, that's a good sign you should sell the company rather than stay independent.
> There are plenty of nuts who'll happily do this for free.
I really doubt this. Not without somebody constantly shilling them into it.
If anybody has numbers, they'd be very welcome. I don't know how to even start measuring this. But one thing seems to be always the same, those people that get large reactions on social networks do have some amount of paid shills.
>This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it.
It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business, but I just don't see how they scale revenue in any large way without pissing off either patrons or creators.
> I think he's acknowledging that his company was un-monetizable and selling was obviously the best thing they could do
That's wrong - WhatsApp was monetized - IIRC, they had 200 million users (and growing) and a staff complement of 50[1]. They could have been easily profitable even if a fraction of their users then paid $1/year, or charged Businesses or bots.
I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea.
That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.
>they have hired “programmers with quantum computers to fight this stuff,”
Wow, either he's talking out his ass or he's been scammed hard. I'm leaning heavily towards the former given the overall shady feel of the business.
I think it's obvious that they knowingly tolerate these fake profiles, if not actively create them. To give the impression that their site has a lot of users.
>These are people -- tricking them into helping to increase your websites monetization is just unethical and wrong.
This only persuades me that they're doing it. I don't believe backlashes are effective in this kind of scenario, as there's no power on the backlash side.
> So if he wasn't trolling, why didn't cryptomaniac use his real account to say this?
I did not make this claim, so feel no need to answer your question.
> It's very sad that these kinds of drive-by accounts are so successful (he got at least two upvotes) for what seems like a personal attack without any data to back up the claims.
I don't think he meant to express it as a statement of fact, but meant to suggest it as his strong oppinion. I just think it was worded badly. Lots of people don't sign up until they decide to make their first comment.
> And it doesn't really make sense to my why a startup would lose face if they shut down a service that wasn't viable. They are expected to experiment. It happens all the time and nobody minds. Sure, it probably makes the decision easier to shut down if there aren't a lot of users, but let's not jump to conclusions.
Many people are embarrased when their companies fail.
>Maybe you're right that it's a bit naive to throw money at internet eccentrics who don't have a plan and trust that they will manage things well.
I don't expect him to manage it well. I'd have been happy if half of the promised work got delivered and the money was spend on hookers and blow. I know most of the fees for my portfolio are funding that type of thing already.
A showcase user for https://www.overyondr.com , probably getting the service at a reduced rate, free or maybe even for some reverse payment in exchange for the publicly.
Cost for yondr should be pretty much proportional to audience size (physical pouches), and Jack White might offer a very good cost/visibility ratio for them. (I don't know anything about his typical audience size, but it might lean towards the smaller end of the spectrum relative to his indisputable fame)
> Even here on HN people created sockpuppet accounts to call me out.
Lots of political and financial interests behind it. For them it's existential as they can't survive in a free and decentralized space even with paid content and bots.
> Has the person who came up with this idea ever met people?
For sure he has absolutely no idea about what people uses IRC regularly. I can picture him thinking about "users" in a general way, like "Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp ad-clicking users", so he's now struggling to keep them tied to the platform at any cost.
Well, no. Thanks to his ignorance that is second only to his greed he's now going to rapidly lose everything. I'd bet a pizza that he'll likely sell at a loss in less than one year.
> and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business.
None? I would think the growing number of users would translate into increased costs. Bandwidth, hardware, lawyers, etc? Do any sites show decreasing costs with increasing popularity?
> some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans.
Some? Do you have some links to share on the matter?
Or how well it would actually pay out, as he's alienating his original user base at the same time.
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