LOL… Who would buy into their IPO now? There’s a HUGE risk of this going to zero.
I think we’re going to see a figurehead change before the IPO if things continue this way. Spiz will “step down” (he’ll probably be bought out, which might be what he’s angling for at this point, talking about wanting to emulate Elon? The most obvious and egregious example of massively and publicly fucking up a social media site??) and the company will put out a statement of “changing course,” basically just muddying the waters about what’s actually happening (while most likely nothing will actually change), say that they’re going to try to fix this fiasco.
It would kill the protests. And that way they can either run out the clock and settle things down before the IPO, or they can put out some vague change that would figuratively make the API more accessible/affordable. But nothing would actually change in the latter scenario, they’d just make a lot of noise about being reasonable while not actually changing anything. Their value could inflate again, protests are quelled due to loss of momentum/loss of popularity, pizzle gets a golden parachute, the company goes public and banks, VCs roll in piles of money, etc. etc.
And the IPO itself is a bad sign no matter who’s in charge. It means the company will be shareholder-driven, and so aiming for maximum profit (or just straight up not operating at a loss to start with). Line must always go up, so when things start to stagnate, or they reach saturation, more and more bold anti-consumer decisions will be made to extract higher profits. See Netflix and their crackdown on password-sharing.
It may not happen straight away, but it will eventually.
Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they’re an optional part of people’s lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it’s marginally more convenient than piracy.
