Get fucked, Bezos.

  • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • ImADifferentBird@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        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?

  • IamSparticles@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      Although in this case, it allowed pretty much every opinion columnist to endorse Harris after Bezos blocked it.

  • Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    It would hurt this sociopath Bezos a lot more if people also canceled Amazon services en mass

      • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        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.

      • andyburke@fedia.io
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        7 days ago

        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 😢😢😢.”

        • glimse@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          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

          • andyburke@fedia.io
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            7 days ago

            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.

        • 9point6@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          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

          • lengau@midwest.social
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            7 days ago

            This is one of the reasons I recommend using any provider that provides you with OpenStack when moving to the cloud.

          • andyburke@fedia.io
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            7 days ago

            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.

            • 9point6@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              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.

              • andyburke@fedia.io
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                7 days ago

                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.)

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      And go where, Azure? GCP? They’re still run by the same club.

    • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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      7 days ago

      He’s no longer the CEO. By your statement, I’m guessing he still has a controlling stake?

  • originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    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

      • originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee
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        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

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      That does little if people keep buying fom amazon store, and they will

    • sheogorath@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      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 🗿

    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      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.

  • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    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?

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.