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When online forums go bad
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When online forums go bad
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02-02-2023, 09:36 PM
Thanks Spokes!
https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109798007902048311 TL;dr: a bunch of online forums got bought by this evil private equity company VerticalScope and destroyed. 
02-02-2023, 10:14 PM
(02-02-2023, 09:36 PM)plam Wrote: Thanks Spokes! When spokes suddenly has a Lamborghini then we should be worried
local cambridge weirdo
02-03-2023, 02:11 AM
Wow. Is there anything private equity cannot capitalize.
02-03-2023, 07:46 PM
(02-02-2023, 10:14 PM)bravado Wrote:(02-02-2023, 09:36 PM)plam Wrote: Thanks Spokes! A really fancy bicycle? 
02-08-2023, 08:11 PM
Good. Lamborghini's stopped looking nice after they finished the Diablo line. :'P
07-29-2023, 02:34 PM
(02-02-2023, 09:36 PM)plam Wrote: Thanks Spokes! I've never understood what they get out of doing that. Most such independent forums barely pay for cloud server resources and a single sys-admin, so I don't see what is there to loot.
07-31-2023, 12:50 AM
(07-29-2023, 02:34 PM)Bytor Wrote:(02-02-2023, 09:36 PM)plam Wrote: Thanks Spokes! Raise money (incur debt), extract money, declare bankruptcy...
07-31-2023, 08:43 AM
(07-31-2023, 12:50 AM)plam Wrote:(07-29-2023, 02:34 PM)Bytor Wrote: I've never understood what they get out of doing that. Most such independent forums barely pay for cloud server resources and a single sys-admin, so I don't see what is there to loot. Who are the rube lenders who are loaning the money?
07-31-2023, 09:56 AM
(07-31-2023, 08:43 AM)ijmorlan Wrote:(07-31-2023, 12:50 AM)plam Wrote: Raise money (incur debt), extract money, declare bankruptcy... The lenders aren't rubes, they're getting their money...the "extract money" phase is key...there's value here, it can be monetized, even if this is destroyed in the process... Capitalists will burn anything down to make a buck, it's how the system works.
07-31-2023, 02:08 PM
(07-31-2023, 09:56 AM)danbrotherston Wrote:(07-31-2023, 08:43 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: Who are the rube lenders who are loaning the money? “Raise money (incur debt), extract money, declare bankruptcy...” So, have the company borrow a bunch of money, then extract it as profit, then have the company declare bankruptcy. In other words, the lenders lose the money. Now obviously banks expect to lose some money some of the time due to bad loans, but if this is a repeating game then I’m wondering why they don’t cotton on. To put it another way, substantially all of the value of the forum is in the intangible value of the community to its participants. It’s not like a factory on a valuable plot of land which can be shut down and sold in pieces (and where this might actually be good, on the whole — for a factory employing a small number of workers on prime real estate to shut down in favour of residential space for many more people is an overall good, even if can be bad for the former employees). In order to extract money value, somebody has to loan money and then lose it. 
07-31-2023, 03:24 PM
(07-31-2023, 02:08 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: To put it another way, substantially all of the value of the forum is in the intangible value of the community to its participants. It’s not like a factory on a valuable plot of land which can be shut down and sold in pieces (and where this might actually be good, on the whole — for a factory employing a small number of workers on prime real estate to shut down in favour of residential space for many more people is an overall good, even if can be bad for the former employees). In order to extract money value, somebody has to loan money and then lose it. In this particular scenario (I knew some of the people whose forums were acquired) Verticalscope was essentially trying to build a community of onlive communities, big enough that they would be able to leverage all those eyeballs for advertising revenue. Individual forums have a great deal of difficulty securing decent advertising rates, and the idea was to have enough size to secure better rates--and make the forums profitable. As far as I know, there were no financial shenanigans involved in this case, maybe just unrealistic expectations and projections. |
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