Get fucked, Bezos.
Ugh. I cancelled my subscription about 2 years ago after being a subscriber for almost a decade. Frankly, the quality of their reporting had taken a sharp nosedive. There was more and more opinion pieces and less actual facts. Which is a shame, because the WaPo used to be a really reliable source.
Although in this case, it allowed pretty much every opinion columnist to endorse Harris after Bezos blocked it.
Serious question, but what stops the editors and writers who feel differently from just telling him no and printing what they want?
I understand he owns them and could fire them, but I think that would be more telling and a much bigger story internationally if he just fired or shut down WaPo for not doing his bidding rather than this subscriber loss being what we see. Journalists used to do real reporting and expose huge things (some still do), so if they actually feel this way about the candidate then they should’ve just printed what they wanted anyway.
I mean, that’s kind of what they did. The Post was absolutely flooded with opinion columns calling out the paper and Bezos for their cowardice, and most of their editorial board has resigned at this point.
Not much considering that’s what the entire editorial staff did anyway.
But they don’t get to control the headline at the top of the front page.
As I’m not in journalism, why couldn’t the most senior editor control the top headline and push out the views of the also believe the same?
I’m sure he could. But I’m guessing he’s a corporate bootlicker.
I can’t believe they have this many subs tbh
This is a huge number too. Apparently the NYT leadership was crowing about gaining 4000 subscriptions over a few months recently.
If gaining 4000 is considered a lot in the industry, losing 200,000 and growing is a roaring statement of disapproval.
As of 2023 they had like 2.5 million subscribers, so it’s like almost 10% That’s pretty huge.
Decimated!
(it’s rare that I get to use this term accurately, let me have this)
Cancel Prime.
Cancel Prime.
Cancel Prime.
I mean, Bezos doesn’t run that either. Might as well just stop using every stock in his portfolio by that logic.
Get Amazon employees to unionize and take back the ship is the answer there. Amazon is annoyingly too big to be affected by even a large grassroots protest.
If only there was reasonable competition, or basically anywhere else I could get certain things without paying a crap load for shipping small things. Even in large cities there just aren’t stores that sell certain things like electronics parts, high quality brand tools, etc. The big box stores just don’t carry a lot of stuff. Not to mention soaps that I use for sensitive skin which places like Walmart doesn’t carry, but the drug stores all got bought out and closed down and the few left now have mostly empty shelves, too. Without Amazon, I just can’t get a lot of things I need or want without traveling hundreds or thousands of miles, and I live in a major city.
That does little if people keep buying fom amazon store, and they will
So, uhh, I got prime when the pricing is glitched and it only cost me less than 2 dollars. If I sub to a twitch streamer Amazon is actually losing money 🗿
The subscription costs then a fraction. They still make money off you
Who tf was subscribed to that rag and was somehow not aware it was Bezos’ propaganda factory? Or were they aware of it and just now decided to draw the line?
It would hurt this sociopath Bezos a lot more if people also canceled Amazon services en mass
And go where, Azure? GCP? They’re still run by the same club.
Leave the cloud.
The OpenStack website has a list of cloud providers who use OpenStack for their clouds. https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/
Oh, if only. AWS is fucking huge and dominates.
There are alternatives with better APIs. Or, you know, don’t buy into the bullshit and rack up a few servers yourself.
Tired of this “oh, but I can’t 😢😢😢.”
That mentality only works in the “adopting cloud” stage. Vendor lock-in is real, and AWS was doing what it does long before there even were competitors, let alone ones with feature parity.
If you start a job somewhere of any reasonable size with incumbent AWS infrastructure, switching to another provider will be an uphill struggle in the best possible circumstance and in most cases it will be a Sisyphean exercise that’ll probably end up with you out of a job before the AWS bill goes down
This is one of the reasons I recommend using any provider that provides you with OpenStack when moving to the cloud.
If you join a company where you have no voice, then you’re going to have a bad time and you may compromise your own morality to get that paycheck.
You can say that there are no other jobs to be had out there, but the current employment rate says you are wrong.
You don’t have to let the business people make you into an amoral cog in a machine.
I have a voice in my role, but I’m not going to pretend I’m the only person at the company.
I’m more making the point that your single voice will not be sufficient to affect direction regarding cloud provider choice in a big enough company, that dice was probably already rolled a decade ago. I’m not saying it’s impossible or anything, but you’re gonna need to come up with an incredible business case for throwing away years of hundreds of engineers’ work building on top of platform A for a costly switch to platform B all for no customer benefit.
I mean, vendor lock-in and lack of resiliency to a vendor-specific outage, maybe caused by some piece of their stack you have never nor will ever touch, or maybe the platform CEO decides your kind of company isn’t expedient for their business anymore, are among the reasons why a company should never have ended up in that situation in the first place.
You can continue along that road of least resistance while ignoring all of the risks. That is up to you. You’ll probably be fine. (Not joking, you’ll be fine. But don’t pretend like this is all necessary.)
Most people using AWS literally can’t switch because most people work for someone else…I don’t think corporate really gives a shit if I don’t like the cloud platform we use
The “business” people in charge. Aka the people who don’t contribute and mostly fuck shit up.
It’s on us engineers to fix their shit thinking. You know they won’t.
It does not have to be this way. Stop pretending it does so that you don’t have to worry about it.
AWS is pretty far from dominating these days. Ms in particular has eaten up a lot of the cloud marketshare. It is huge but definitely not the overwhelming share that they used to have.
He’s no longer the CEO. By your statement, I’m guessing he still has a controlling stake?
He makes the full valuation of the WSJ every few weeks via Amazon stock. It could be assumed, then, that he cares about Amazon’s stock price
The paradox: if, instead, 200,000 newcomers were to subscribe, the WaPo might be economically viable and then it could fire its owner.
The WaPo is currently losing tens of millions of USD a year. That is not so much its fault as our fault. We are the ones who prefer to pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime than for quality journalism.
That’s not how it works
Most old media are loss-makers. The owners are fine with that because owning a newspaper allows you to influence public perceptions.
Why would I pay for news controlled by a billionaire? My tax money already goes towards CBC who are… probably better than WaPo.
Well sure, if you’re Canadian then none of this is your problem.
For now. But the whole world consumes US media which is allowing fascism to spread like a malignant cancer
fire its owner
Ummm, pardon? How does that work?
The Post could lose all its subscribers and Bezos could still easily cover costs. He isn’t in the newspaper business for the money. He bought it for exactly moments like these. 8% is how much he just paid to hedge his bets
No point covering costs if no one is reading.
Yeah I was being hyperbolic for effect, but the point is that he owns the WaPo so that he can use it for his own personal social and political gain, not to make money off of it. I doubt the WaPo readership will substantially drop from this. And I have many questions about the people who still read his rag
