it would be kind of like that except that

• spez et al wouldn’t be able to choose to keep a controlling number of shares. all the shares would be offloaded. he could have 1 share just like any other user.

• laws that govern publicly traded businesses would not apply. it would be a coop or other model. details would depend on jurisdiction(s) but many do have separate legal structures for such entities. In the US, REI and in Canada, MEC are buyer coops which are fairly well known. There are also housing coops and other structures for inspo.

• shares could only be owned by people who had a specific kind of interest in the project, such as being individual users, mods etc. furthermore, individuals would be limited in number of shares (e.g. 1 share each)

This is not a fully formed proposal. :) but in terms of thinking about how the world could be I think a worthwhile train of thought.

a person who was interested in this kind of thing could do a websearch for “the cooperative movement” for historical context. not to be overly rosy about it, the movement basically failed to accomplish its goals at the end of the day. however, it did make a lot of good interventions while it was existing. for example the famed (if crumbling) canadian health are system is a result of cooperative farmers’ movement. furthermore, coops which continue to exist under capitalism experience a lot of tensions and can become corrupted.

also lookup: Mondragon in spain

boycotts have always been very difficult to pull off and fail virtually every time.

For pros and cons a good place to start is Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 by the great community organizer Saul Alinsky. He has many stories to illustrate but in summary writes regarding boycotts:

Once the battle is joined and a tactic is employed, it is important that the conflict not be carried on over too long a time. …There are many reasons of human experience arguing for this point. I cannot repeat too often that a conflict that drags on too long becomes a drag. The same universality applies for a tactic or for any other specific action.

Among the reasons is the simple fact that human beings can sustain an interest in a particular subject only over a limited period of time. The concentration, the emotional fervor, even the physical energy, a particular experience that is exciting, challenging, and inviting, can last just so long — this is true of the gamut of human behavior, from sex to conflict. After a period of time it becomes monotonous, repetitive, an emotional treadmill, and worse than anything else a bore. From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time.

BTW Alinsky (b.1909) wrote this book to try to stop baby boomers from being dumb and fouling everything up. I am not a huge fan of the intergenerational model of class conflict but I think it is interesting.

this would have been a good thing to do for some of the people who deleted their accounts. the ones who had accounts which could have credibly been given subs.

even though that sub is like the most annoying and sanctimonious place on reddit, I am sad for these people that they are losing their forum. where else will people express their anxiety over wasting lemon seeds by throwing them away? or congratulate each other on the ecological benefits of purchasing complicated, unfix-able gadgets to perform simple and infrequently performed tasks?

For anyone who like me has never heard of “temu”, it is said to be some sort of chinese “fast fashion” website which might/probably traffic in the products of slave labor. Presumably in a way which exceeds other “fast fashion” but my investigation was quite shallow.

the solution is to collectivize reddit but I do not have a good plan about how to do that.