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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.

    The issue is that you don’t have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can’t even build your lemonade stand.

    Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.

    So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you’re making from the lemonade.

    That’s OK for me, though. I wasn’t doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it’s finished, I’m fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.

    So everything is tugging along and now you’re actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you’ve always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don’t actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.

    Currently, your company haven’t made a single cent, but that’s fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.

    Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.

    So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.

    Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can’t actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company’s value plummets and eventually closes down.

    Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn’t make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You’re also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.


  • Honestly, I would probably be using both, in that case. The Threadiverse feels a lot like the early days of Reddit and I would love to be part of it and see it grow up. Assuming this keeps expanding, it’s too late for me to go back to exclusively using Reddit at this point. Giga brain Mr. Huffman made sure of that.

    However, there are numerous great communities at Reddit that haven’t found a place here yet. Especially many of the smaller subs that were already very niche as it is, and that one probably won’t not find anywhere else anytime soon.

    I’m already regularly using multiple different sites as it is. Both larger international ones, as well as smaller local blogs and forums. I don’t personally see an issue by itself to keep both Reddit and Kbin on that list.

    Hopefully, we will see entirely new communities pop up and grow in the Threadiverse. That is, communities that aren’t just different flavours of “Reddit sucks”. Not saying it’s not entertaining, but I think we need to broaden the scope a bit going forward. :)



  • I’m absolutely baffled over how much of a clusterfuck Reddit and particularly Huffman personally has turned this into.

    Why in the ever loving PR suicide by not shutting the fuck up, did Reddit think that starting a war against their own moderators would be a good idea? I’m wondering if I have ever seen a company handle a situation this badly before. This is utterly insane.

    Huffman has somehow managed to take a mild inconvenience that would blow over in a few days and turned that into a major crisis and then turned that crisis into an existential threat to the future of the company.


  • That’s perhaps the most frustrating part. There are numerous ways they could have handled this that at worst would have resulted in a few people whining about it and then moving on.

    Even if he had just shut the fuck up for a few days, most subs would probably be up by now. But no, his fragile ego couldn’t handle it, so he decided to go on a personal crusade against the very people who are working for free to keep the site running.

    Without the mods and power users, Reddit has barely any value whatsoever.