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It hasn't turned a profit in 20 years, it should be a terrible business model, but they are probably going to be bought by the big tech companies to train LLM's. (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by qaz to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Not making a profit on paper does not mean it's a terrible business model. It's how businesses reduce the taxes they pay and how they can afford the hundreds of millions of dollars of payment to the board members.

Amazon was unprofitable for like 20 years out of its total lifetime (not consecutively).

Don't let this business terminology fool you into thinking it's worthless. If anything we need to be puting these companies under the microscope for what they're doing to pay less taxes than they really should be. We need to start closing the loop holes.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I wouldn't jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn't alienate increasing numbers of their users. It's basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.

Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn't have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn't really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it's no longer worth anything.