this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Lmao this puritanical turn from all these tech companies over the last 5-6 years I don't get it. All they are going to do is speed self-immolation. What is happening to the internet.
All companies that go to IPO purge their porn content beforehand unless they are dedicated pornography businesses, and even those have a massive shakeup of what content is and is not allowed (pornhub and onlyfans being examples). It's not because they're "puritanical". When a company IPOs it opens itself up to share purchases but what most people miss is that it also opens itself up to shortselling, this is essentially a shares "downvote" where the person shorting a company can make money if the company's value goes down.
Negative press causes a company's value to go down. And the people that own the press are the financial industry, they use and weaponise their media contacts and friends to achieve financial outcomes very successfully.
So when a company IPOs one of the things it does is seek to remove all possible things on a service that can be weaponised as negative press against the company in order for people to profit off of shortselling the drop in value this causes in the market.
The situation is that Reddit and Imgur have a sizeable amount of likely illegal pornographic content on their servers.
Their options are:
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 losing a sizeable amount of users (see Tumblr).
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. I guarantee that there is a significant amount of underage content uploaded to it, certainly enough to stir up a shitstorm in the media.
To implement proper age verification for pornographic content, like pornhub and onlyfans did. But in the investment world it is unpopular to be seen as a person that invests in pornography, 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 it clear that Reddit is a pornography business. Thus also devaluing the investment.
The VC money dried up
They are losing access to nearly limitless free money