I hope no corporation buys https://letterboxd.com which is currently similar to the good old Goodreads but for movies.
Letterboxd is already owned by a corporation, Letterboxd Ltd.
https://opencorporates.com/companies/nz/3628371
Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
401–410 of 493 posts
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#402so one doesn't have to deal w/ WaPo paywall nonsense: https://web.archive.org/web/20230701144801/https://www.washi...
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t work in practice due to typically severe time constraints. You cannot expect a business that has 6 days of life left to wait for such an approval process. These things never happen fast.
What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically happen in a 6 day timeframe? I know this is already a stressed straw man in the first place but M&A are aren't a short simple process anyway. Adding some oversight isn't going to change that. Yes there are tradeoffs to more regulation vs total anarchy/free market. That doesn't mean they're not worth it. "Good" is not the enemy of "perfect" and all.
> What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically happen in a 6 day timeframe?
Virtually every single bank failure that happens results in an M&A that is negotiated over a weekend.
Most recently Credit Suisse collapsed in March. UBS bought it on Monday, March 19, after negotiations began on Friday, March 16. UBS offered a price that was 60% lower than the Friday closing price. The deal was accepted.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway. That's where my pet antitrust solution succeeds where others fail: ban all M&A. Companies only engage in mergers to consolidate market share, but their market share consolidation (i.e. monopolization) not only decreases competition, but also comes at the expense of employees and customers of the acq…
> Nobody wins except the monopolist, and monopolies are already bad, so why help them? You are obviously entitled to the opinion that monopolies are bad but, fwiw, the ftc is a lot more concerned with anti-competitive behavior than it is with monopolies. Those get conflated because they frequently occur together but a lot of companies have monopolies that most people don't really have an issue with because they aren'…
>> Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else.
There is also the case of "natural monopolies" in economics, these are railways, postal services, etc. where it wouldn't make sense for multiple players to waste resources and the one player can benefit from economies of scale. It'd be hilarious if 2-3 rail companies tried setting up their own tracks, stations, signals, etc. in a small town for example. So much redundancy all going waste.
Another example is multiple telecom companies trying to erect their own towers in vicinity of a little town where only one is enough to provide coverage. It's a collosal waste for the whole society, not just those companies.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody wins except the monopolist, and monopolies are already bad, so why help them? You are obviously entitled to the opinion that monopolies are bad but, fwiw, the ftc is a lot more concerned with anti-competitive behavior than it is with monopolies. Those get conflated because they frequently occur together but a lot of companies have monopolies that most people don't really have an issue with because they aren'…
>> Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else. There is also the case of "natural monopolies" in economics, these are railways, postal services, etc. where it wouldn't make sense for multiple players to waste resources and the one player can benefit from economies of scale. It'd be hilarious if 2-3 rail companies tried setting up their own tracks, stations, signals, etc. in a small…
More than railways, imagine if roads were privatised and you had 2-3 roading networks trying to get to as many homes/business/etc. as possible
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, this is also the conclusion that I've come to. Mergers only make markets less competitive, and the mere existence of acquisitions creates perverse incentives that distort the startup market into utter uselessness. The experiment has failed, ban it all, and ignore the protestations of the get-rich-quick crowd. Of course, to fix the overall market you'll also need to break up all the existing megacorps in the pro…
But... mergers really do not only make markets less competitive at all! May mergers of huge companies often have negative impact. Firstly most mergers do not involve multi-billion dollar companies at all, secondly many mergers occur when one company is is trouble, and thirdly good takeovers increase distribution of the smaller companies brand. Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include: Halotop b…
Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else. There is also the case of "natural monopolies" in economics, these are railways, postal services, etc. where it wouldn't make sense for multiple players to waste resources and the one player can benefit from economies of scale. It'd be hilarious if 2-3 rail companies tried setting up their own tracks, stations, signals, etc. in a small…
More than railways, imagine if roads were privatised and you had 2-3 roading networks trying to get to as many homes/business/etc. as possible
> imagine if roads were privatised and you had 2-3 roading networks trying to get to as many homes/business/etc. as possible
This would never happen. If roads were privatized they wouldn't care about connecting as many homes/business as possible, they'd only care about building roads where it was the most profitable for them and even then any roads that made less money would be left in increasingly poor condition.
It wouldn't leave taxpayers off the hook either. Governments would have to spend taxpayer money to incentivize private companies to build out in "unprofitable" areas, but those roads would be kept in the worst conditions of all (assuming that companies didn't just repeatedly promise to build them, only to pocket the taxpayer's money while providing nothing)
Some services are worth enough to the public good that profit shouldn't be the only consideration, and some are worth so much that profit shouldn't be the goal at all and instead those services should simply strive to do the job required for every citizen with as little genuine waste as possible.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#408Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…
Agree completely. Scoring is mostly a cultural thing, I presume based on how the person experienced grades in school and their social pressures to attain certain grades. As a child I moved from a country where getting any grade below 9/10 was a shame to one where 7 was good enough, a 9 was very rare.
Because of this all the review systems like IMDB are flawed by design.
Steam reviews are the most trustworthy for me. While they are not perfect, the binary choice normalizes these scoring differences, and can be read as a "probability that you will enjoy X if your are interested in this sort of thing" which is the best one can hope for.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically happen in a 6 day timeframe? I know this is already a stressed straw man in the first place but M&A are aren't a short simple process anyway. Adding some oversight isn't going to change that. Yes there are tradeoffs to more regulation vs total anarchy/free market. That doesn't mean they're not worth it. "Good" is not the enemy of "perfect" and all.
> What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically happen in a 6 day timeframe? Virtually every single bank failure that happens results in an M&A that is negotiated over a weekend. Most recently Credit Suisse collapsed in March. UBS bought it on Monday, March 19, after negotiations began on Friday, March 16. UBS offered a price that was 60% lower than the Friday closing price. The deal was accepted.
Interestingly in this case an "approval" similar to the one we are talking about did happen over that weekend didn't it? I think the approvers brokered the deal.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, this is also the conclusion that I've come to. Mergers only make markets less competitive, and the mere existence of acquisitions creates perverse incentives that distort the startup market into utter uselessness. The experiment has failed, ban it all, and ignore the protestations of the get-rich-quick crowd. Of course, to fix the overall market you'll also need to break up all the existing megacorps in the pro…
But... mergers really do not only make markets less competitive at all! May mergers of huge companies often have negative impact. Firstly most mergers do not involve multi-billion dollar companies at all, secondly many mergers occur when one company is is trouble, and thirdly good takeovers increase distribution of the smaller companies brand. Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include: Halotop b…
> Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include:
How are you defining "good" or "successful" here?