this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Board is elected by shareholders. Until the IPO, there's no way of knowing what percentage of the company each interested party owns. If spez or his buddies own 51% or more of the company, the company runs on "fuck you, I do what I want" style. The leverage investors would have would be 1) what to do with the percentage of the company they own 2) withdraw money 3) buy out spez and his buddies 4) sue if they can prove the company misrepresented what it was going to do with their investment money.
Which route they'd prefer would depend on their assessment of the total valuation of the platform and the contractual terms of their initial investment
great answer thank you!
so, sounds like #3 could be good if there is anyone decent with enough money to spend on it. which I can't imagine who that would be.
A lawsuit would take ages, even if it was simple, which I doubt would be the case, and I doubt a judge is going to make specific rulings about API fees or whatever.
Wild fantasy: form a collective (some sort of formal co op structure) of users/mods/devs and buy out some investor(s), OR wait til the IPO and buy lots of shares to have a formal voting bloc. What do you think? I am thinking of some sort of semi democratic/representative structure. Better or worse? It burns to the ground in chaotic drama, or it manages to be barely coherent enough to function with all internally competing interests?
I would advise against buying stocks in a corporation as part of a hostile takeover. If reddit has a competent legal team (though I'm not convinced they do), such an action will accomplish nothing and the company will simply be flush with cash from the IPO. Alternatively, you succeed, and then what? What does distributed governance of a community hosting platform look like? How do you tackle all of the financial pressures that led Reddit to turn into what it is today? I think the more sustainable solution is to put your energy into advocating for alternative platforms such as here, tildes, or squabbles
Also, I never recommend any financial investing strategy that doesn't put you first. Not that I'm saying the stock market is good, but because it's part of an overall exploitative system, and your financial strategy needs to be your plan for navigating that system. Foolhardy investment strategies run a ton of risk of feeding the exploiters and leaving yourself with nothing to survive on. I know that sounds bleak and dramatic, but seriously, please distrust banking practices the exact right amount to keep yourself from getting hosed
OK, ok you talked me out of even a day dream. I do remember hearing about people trying to make changes at... coca cola (?) doing shareholder action trying to get them to stop stealing water from people or something like that and it basically didn't work.
Agree wrt stock market etc. I mean the whole thing is based around the workers at the companies being fucked and you are just trying to get in and exploit them a bit extra. That is your best case scenario as an "investor". I was kind of filling in an implied worker coop thing I guess. Anyway this kind of intervention has been attempted in various venues for decades and never works as far as I know. Sometimes worker take over and worker buy outs do work and I guess that is more what I am really thinking of. I am thinking of the 3rd party devs, mods and users as workers. But you are right they never succceeed to take over via sneaky means; only directly.