asaramis's comments

is this for real and should I be angry?

Cathie Wood and ARK are selling too. While putting out a report with a price target of $4,600 for TSLA, they’ve been taking profits and trimming their TSLA position in their flagship ARKK fund from almost 4 million shares to less than 1 million. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Tesla is publicly saying the stock will quadruple, while cutting their holdings by 75%.

That Brian Chesky video is incredible. I hope if any fallout - AirBnB manages to stay afloat.

This has been the most infuriating thing, and as someone who works in media - can trace it directly back to the hire of the former Time Inc COO: https://www.ozy.com/the-new-and-the-next/can-she-make-brands...

They turned Time Inc into a spammy content factory - did huge deals with Taboola/Outbrain, along with creating stuff like a short FB video show about brunch foods. Came over to Reddit and keeps spouting off these huge proclamations about billions of users. They came over right after the huge raise so it's clear that the clear mandate is to commercialize at every possibly touchpoint.

I'll give credit to the NYT journalist at least for showing their work in this thread: https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/12812471249155809...

this is kind of the perfect example - in theory, the secondary market should correctly price the ISAs based on the quality of the students being graduated.

But there is a significant lag built in on the pricing. It would probably be a few cycles of students, and you wouldn't even know they're not getting good jobs for a number of months if not years. Especially given Austen's kind of a celeb, Lambda could raised a few bigger and bigger rounds in that time period - and their numbers would look fantastic to potential investors with the cash coming in up front. If they played it right, they could maybe even IPO before those secondary ISAs ever get properly priced. Financial innovation at its finest!

The other two major parts of this:

Facebook's ad model is built to reward "virality" - meaning being over the top and salacious means lower costs. Even Boz acknowledges that was part of the Trump team's genius - they used the platform, as it was built, perfectly. The Democrats naturally have equal access to this platform, so I don't think its as much a left-right thing, vs a crazy-calm divide.

The other thing is just disinformation / identity verification - making sure all advertisers are who they say they are (and you don't get russians posing as black lives matter, etc.)

How do they not address the actual financials? (saying "Numbers aside" and then digging into the strategy shift).

I'm more curious - out of the $200mm they are projecting this year, or the $100mm they made last year - what did they spend? Their business model seems even more insane than Groupons to me.

They apparently have to pay out $12-15 per class to the studios. Had heard that on a $99 membership, with about $50 going to normal expenses (staff, marketing, etc), if a member takes 4 classes in a month they're already underwater - and they'll lose money on every additional class that user takes.

Want to know if that is true!

So has anyone actually gone swimming with the Apple Watch? I'm still nervous..and how come they don't have proper waterproof cases?

Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit?

I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringing will be the one who figures out how to retain the spirit, activity, and engagement of Reddit, while satisfying that 10x, $500mm valuation.

This ain't sexist, this is anti-elitist.Cutting and pasting monetization templates from other media properties, and building projected revenue models off of traffic numbers just can't work here. It's not Buzzfeed or Business Insider.

I was suspect when Erik Martin left (had the pleasure of meeting him in NYC, he lived and breathed what makes Reddit wonderful), and this really seems to solidify what I guess should've been pretty obvious.

I genuinely hope Ms. Pao holds things together, and the return of Alexis helps things out. The more I've learned, it seems Alexis was already gone by the time Reddit really took off and has been writing and speaking ever since. Curious how his operational prowess shows through the new chairmanship role.

Rant done. We're praying for you Reddit.

Main difference is stories aren't fact-checked before discussing. In the end the right information ends up disseminated probably as often as a standard news story, it's just the 'sausage is made' in the public eye vs. in a closed newsroom the public has no visibility to.

Would disagree here. Facebook as a platform promotes feel-good stuff and it's been self-reinforcing. It makes the space more attractive to advertisers and everyone "wins" (while we all lose).

I still however believe people are smart on average, and are becoming better and better at thinking critically. Possibly a bit naive, but I hope as information becomes more accessible, people will only develop a better sense for what's bullshit (again, no matter who it's produced by).

I feel you've just perfectly described the variety of newsrooms that produce the stories we read every day!

I found this article to embody every problem with the attitude of journalists from traditional media institutions. The author effectively is lamenting his loss of role as the gatekeeper of all information. Apparently, all journalism was 'pure' and devoid of any conflicts of interest and the only way to receive the 'truth' for a reader.

You can see this near arrogance flow through much of the anecdotes. "Ugh, more and more PR people trying to get my attention all the time. It's sooo annoying." "Ugh, PR girls are even trying to sleep with me, but you can't compromise my editorial integrity." It's perfectly represents the entitlement of the gatekeeper role that must've been built into that last generation of journalists.

Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit, whether produced by a corporation, a newspaper, or an individual. When news media held a monopoly on distribution and there were few sources of info, I understand the danger of a corporation holding the sole lifeline of info. That's no longer the case.

This is a perfect combination of every short-sighted, angry old media, and old man rant I've ever come across. I mean, to go from hating on BuzzFeed to somehow ending up on the "Africa is one single country and let's help it" trope is quite impressive.

Best article that sums up what Buzzfeed is really about, and why I believe it is incredible for the future of journalism is this piece by Felix Salmon. Basically, he makes the point that Buzzfeed is in effect a massive advertising agency, and their content efforts are all experiments to better understand how to reach younger people. They then make money off of selling that expertise to brands.

That is a much more sustainable, legitimate form of funding a news business vs. the world of doing anything you can to get eyeballs to your page and selling ads around it. It means constant experimentation in the fields of communication and storytelling built on the back of an incredible technology company.

The best part of the entire Filloux piece, it was Chris Dixon who led the investment (someone pointed that out nicely in the comments). Does he not even realize that VC firms almost always have internal dissension and investments aren't unanimous? He has zero way of knowing Ben Horowitz's take on the investment.

https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/normally-when-some-big-deal-...

Great presentation! Very fascinated by this world and Prismatic definitely appears to be at the forefront of achieving relevance. What I've been kind of baffled by are businesses like Taboola, Gravity and Outbrain. I understand their businesses are centered around placement of "related" or 'personalized' articles of boobs, bikinis, and booze just so you click so they get paid, but do you think behind the scenes they have relevance and personalization technology on par with Prismatic? They have a ton of money and people so you'd think they should be able to recommend genuinely relevant content, but publicly never appears so

Good catch that Weebly was YC. Only hear of it from super novice people needing to make websites and was kinda shocked when I saw that in the metadata

Agreed, I'm American but went to a French business school. I am still completely thrown off even with cheek-kissing women, and god help me when one of the guys goes in for the double-double.

Captures the entire problem with the news industry right now: "Why is this closure happening, then? It's a business thing, and like most business things it's not easy to explain or understand unless you spend all day crunching numbers and paying bills. Which I don't."

Yet another inflammatory "China is hacking us" article from CNN. How vulnerable are we really (I trust this forum much more than some CNN reporter on this question)

204 - No Content - P Diddy - A rapper who has somehow gained fame yet has no real creative output

202 - Accepted - Jay Z - Guessing a reference to him always talking about graduating from the School of Hard Knocks?

200 - OK - L'il Jon - His most popular guttural exclamation from his song of the same name

304 - Not modified - Dre - You may have forgotten about him, but he's still Dre

402 - Payment Required - 50 Cent - He is one looking to Get Rich or Die Tryin'

404 - Not Found - Sisqo - He introduced us to the Thong Song, but then has been nowhere to be found in over a decade

413 - Request Entity too large - Rick Ross - The man is just so damn big

(not sure if the songs are directly connected to the reference as in the case of Sisqo or Rick Ross, but more to the rapper?)