i feel like a decade or more of places like twitter and tumblr and reddit and whatever operating at large scales without ever being profitable has really skewed people's perceptions of social media in a financial sense. because i think people think "they're really massive websites that are part of our daily lives and they pay so many people and their ceos are all rich, so they must make tons of money!"
these sites never made money. they just had enough VC to coast for a really fucking long time. well, they do bring some money in, but it's not enough revenue to cover costs, so the total ends up being in the negatives. they don't actually profit.
i keep seeing calls to try to get more users on the site but more users doesn't fix the business model. if cohost gets a million users tomorrow, not only do their operational costs go up, but they eventually have to hire more moderators and staff. each new person they hire is getting $94k salaries because they all get paid the same, and each new person they hire gets to be a co-owner of the company. that doesn't scale to the size of something like twitter. but even if it did? twitter doesn't actually make money. even at the size and prominence of it. reddit is one of the biggest websites in the world and does not make money. all of these websites lose money, just like cohost, because social media isn't profitable. they just have an endless amount of money to lose and no obligation to pay it back. cohost has loans.
throwing more users at the site doesn't really help, unless every. single. new user subscribes. even then it doesn't increase revenue all that much, but at least if they subscribe they don't cost the site more money by being there for free.
like i know i'm a broken record now but this is a structural problem. this is a large scale problem. the devs have even said as much in their post and in their comments to people on that post. you cannot fix this by getting your friends to join. you cannot fix this by throwing fives of dollars at it. cohost has to shift their business model radically to turn things around, and that's something they have to do that you cannot really do anything about as a user. frankly the history of corporate social media platforms (and by corporate i mean Run As A Business vs like a forum someone runs as a hobby, I am including cohost in corporate here) tells me that nobody has figured out how to make it profitable, so if cohost manages it they will be breaking new ground. But that's what they will have to do. As a user, you really have to relinquish control here, you cannot right this ship yourself, nothing you are doing is changing what is happening here. The cohost staff has to fix it, and THEY know they have to fix it, and they have told you they are the ones who have to fix it. There wasn't a call to action for the users in that post. If you want to throw them $5 or buy a sticker or whatever you can go ahead an do that, but if you are doing it thinking it is going to solve anything you need to step back a minute and actually look at the situation a bit more.
