“We won’t use it for that even though we could”
Is just the first step in a series of corporate decisions that inevitably leads to
“We know we said we wouldn’t, but we didn’t realize how much money we could make”
Google took “do no evil” out of their mission statement. Why would you trust them to stick to their word and not develop this tech in a way that helps their own ad platform make money?
That’s the dumbest part. There’s no guarantee that this ipo bid is going to pan out. Huffman is betting big, it’s just too bad he’s so full of himself that he doesn’t realize his actions will probably be what causes this ipo to fail.
He wanted to fly under the radar and make changes that look good on paper while keeping the community relatively the same. Instead he made a splash so big that major news outlets are still talking about it months later, and now he’s actively alienating the volunteer work that holds the whole site together.
“Become profitable” is just their stated goal.
I think that their actual goal is to look profitable for the upcoming ipo so that the CEOs can cash a fat check and leave. They likely don’t care about what happens after that.
So the “become profitable while simultaneously destroying everything that made it valuable” platitude is more like “they’re cutting down the tree for the wood without thinking about the squirrels”
Two lines on a graph don’t prove that statement. What you’ve proven is that the chair of Mozilla is making more as the market share is going down. Now connect the dots with a source that shows why those numbers matter and you’re golden.