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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

    Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

    Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.


  • No chance.

    Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.

    With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.



  • The “Top Day” sorting option does this, but posts fall off a cliff rather than falling off gradually. My understanding is that they’ll remain on the page from hour 0 to hour 23, but then completely disappear starting in hour 24.

    Instead of that, it would be ideal to implement a mathematical formula that pushes pages higher into the rankings with every upvote, comment, or view it gets, but pushes posts lower in the rankings with every additional hour passed. You have to tweak the specific parameters of that formula to get it right, but it essentially forces posts off the page after enough time has passed, while introducing new posts to replace the old. Unlike the “Top Day” sort where things are a step function, the idea with this is to make it gradual so that a popular post falls from #1 overall down to #2, then #3, etc. over the course of a day.



  • Agreed. Something like Top for the last 4 hours would be super easy to implement because Top for the last day already exists (just change 24 hours to 4 hours in the code that fetches comments). However, for those that are used to checking the site multiple times in a day, you don’t want to ge served up the same content every time you check. Top for the past 4 hours would seemingly be a decent balance between giving posts that have some type of traction while not giving posts that are stale.



  • Interesting article. I appreciate that it included the example of a couple in Jersey City, NJ being forced to move because of increasingly exorbitant rent. That article could have been about me personally. I lived in a shitty overpriced 1br apartment that overlooked the Holland Tunnel. Rent was around $2200/year, but they wanted $2700/year for us upon renewal, and after we said no, they upped it to $2900/year when offered to the general public. This was June 2022, and a quick look on their website suggests similar units sell for $3300/month now. I make a decent living, but that increase was way too much for me. That was the final straw to get me to move out of NJ entirely and down to the relatively more affordable DC area. It was similar for many of my neighbors. The NYC area will always have a special place in my heart, but there’s only so much you can take before you begin looking to alternatives.


  • I’m mixed on this. I really don’t want the market even more fractured with yet another streaming service in the mix for MLB games. Ten years ago, it was simple albeit flawed. Subscribe to cable TV if you live in the market, and the RSN has all the games. Today, if you want to watch all the games, you have to bounce around between the RSN, but then a dozen different streaming sites too with games on Apple TV, YouTube, MLB Network, Peacock, ESPN, potentially Netflix, etc… I just want to load up the MLB app, pay a reasonable annual fee, and stream all games without blackout restrictions, but such a service doesn’t exist (legally). Aa a result, I find myself caring about the product less and less with each passing year.