Canada shouldn't become a country where the government decides what we see, hear, and do. They already meddle in that too much, and blocking websites that aren't engaging in illegal activity is absurd. Will they block the Fediverse next?
All Meta is doing here is complying with the new law. The government said "pay to link to news sites or stop linking to them" and that's exactly what Meta is doing. It's another stupid law pushed by corporate Canada for their own benefit, and now they're surprised at the most obvious outcome.
Huffman claims it's about things like LLM training that uses the API, as if it isn't possible to validate apps that want to use the API and only issue keys for approved apps. This could save third party apps while preventing bad actors from gaining access to the data without scraping the site.
No, if bad actors were the problem then the solution would be much different.
It's laughable that Huffman thinks people don't realize how much smaller Reddit is than Google or Facebook.
Most of what Huffman said here is about cost-cutting. If Reddit had 1800 employees before the layoffs, then yes, it's probably bloated and laying off another 800 employees probably wouldn't affect the end-user experience.
The problem remains that Huffman sees how users want to use Reddit as bad for the company. There doesn't seem to be any reason why Reddit couldn't have monetized their API through ads, making third party apps similarly profitable as their own app. And if their own app isn't profitable through ads, then what's their plan? Moving all those users to their first party app doesn't fix anything.
Hosting sfw video is just not profitable on the scale that youtube does it
Youtube had $28.8b in revenue in 2021. While revenue isn't profit, I can't imagine it's losing money with that much revenue. It'd be hard for someone else to duplicate it, but not impossible if they have a strong business plan from the start.
YouTube was launched in 2005. It was founded by three PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who ran the company from an office above a small restaurant in San Mateo. The first video uploaded to the platform was “Me at the zoo”, featuring Karim. By the years end, YouTube was hosting over two million videos per day on its website and was averaging over 20 million daily active users. It wouldn’t be long before Google scooped up YouTube, acquiring the startup for $1.65 billion in late 2006. What was considered at the time to be a huge reach for a startup which had shown no capability or interest in generating profit is now recognized as one of the smartest acquisitions of the