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burkaman10/10/20242 repliesview on HN

If you're wondering what happened to Fandom, just look at who runs it now.

> In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom.

> In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)

It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.


Replies

zoeysmithe10/10/2024

Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm.

The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.

We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.

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