Its destined to tank no matter what happens.
The situation is that Reddit and Imgur have a sizeable amount of likely illegal pornographic content on their servers.
Their options are:
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To ban all the porn. Which it looks like they are trying to do. On paper this is the best option for investors, as it protects the investment. However in the real world this can piss off the userbase and tank the website by loosing a sizeable amount of users (see Tumblr).
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To continue without any changes. This is also guarantees the investment tanking, all it takes is one Anderson Cooper style jailbait investigation into Reddit to destroy the investment.
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To implement proper verification for pornographic content, like pornhub and onlyfans did. But as I said, the investors don’t want it to be public knowledge that they are investing in a porn website in some way, and Reddit implementing proper verification processes will make that public knowledge. Thus also devaluing the investment.
There is no way to win for the investors .
Why is option one bad for investors? If you have 100 million pre-ban users you can’t invest in and 20 million of them leaves because of the porn ban that still gives you 80 million users you can invest in.
It’s the same thing with requiring user accounts. Hosting a billion images for random people for free is less interesting from an investment perspective than hosting 200 million images for registered user that you can extract more data from and maybe even sell a premium subscription to.
Services that makes the internet convenient, accessible and anonymous are not necessarily a good capitalist investment. Stuff like somewhere you can upload images to is more like a public utility in nature than a capitalist business.
Yes, on paper that is how it should work. But look at what happened to Tumblr after they banned porn. Form a 1 billion dollar valuation to only being worth a few million.
Yeah it’s great that they get fucked over. Reddit has dug its own grave with its :ancap-good: attitude towards NSFW content, and now that they have to actually follow the laws to make money, they’re fucked.
Some of the laws are dumb sure, but some of the laws should be basic stuff any website should implement if they are going to allow porn on it.
