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.
I'm sure a LLM trained on Reddit conversations will be a well-balanced, polite, and reasonable conversationalist and not a contradictory mess trying to figure out which brand of spite is most acceptable. Remember in 2016 when Microsoft plugged the chatbot "Tay" into the internet and it went full psycho Nazi in 24 hours?
Thanks a lot 4chan. I dislike people that think 4chan is whatever they claim it is outside of /pol/. They are deluded and narrow minded. These people virtue signal and love lemmy/reddit/digg/slashdot, which is chan culture minus slurs.
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.
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.
It's called shorting. At a high level you're basically betting on the stock going down (which is the opposite of buying a stock where you want it to go up). Normally you can only lose the amount of money you put in with stocks, but for shorting you may lose an "unlimited" amount of money depending on how high the price goes up (it's dependent on how much the stock goes up, but no stock goes up forever).
Shorting is a big part of the GME spike. Large trading firms were shorting the shit out of gamestop and so when WSB bought stocks en masse it lead to almost bankruptcy for some companies.
Seriously?
It's just the knowledge you are lacking? If You have the funds to do it just meet with an investment banker and they can help you do it. Short selling is not something I would recommend doing yourself even "knowing enough about stocks". If you are serious about a short, you understand it's a pretty high level of risk but if there is a payout, the cost of bringing in a pro is well worth it.
I'm sure a LLM trained on Reddit conversations will be a well-balanced, polite, and reasonable conversationalist and not a contradictory mess trying to figure out which brand of spite is most acceptable. Remember in 2016 when Microsoft plugged that chatbot into the internet and it went full psycho Nazi in 24 hours?