What if they bought HN? Then throwing money at the problem would probably be a good thing for them.

It's ludicrous, but technically possible, and amusing to think about. Thank you for suggesting that.

Like Conde Nast bought reddit?

And saw no return, put next to no effort into improvements, and later spun them back into the wild.

And in the meantime, reddit's community was completely unaffected by the changing of hands.

Reddit is now worth at least ten times as much as when it was acquired.

True, but this wasn't the doing of Conde Nast, nor did Conde Nast see this 10x increase when they pushed reddit out on its own. Reddit's growth was organic.

Last I heard, CN still owns reddit even though the site now operates independently, so CN still has the chance to recoup their investment, but this will take a more profitable business model without sacrificing user trust. Valuations on sheer page hits or user counts are faulty with a capital F U if you can't figure out how to make money from them.

It doesn't matter if it was Conde Nast's doing. They made an investment in a new media property, and it has seemingly gone splendidly with little to no 'fallout' from having a corporate overlord owning a community site.

Reddit could make a fortune - they just don't try very hard. We'll see what the next CEO does. But if profit was a concern for Conde Nast it wouldn't be hard to deliver it.

Couldn't you just build more robots to do install, removing, r&d, etc

A good laugh.

Thanks, I've updated AngelLest with the latest news:

> Pre-production continues on the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia, and production begins on June 1, 2012 in Los Angeles.

At the time, we were very close to going through with a deal. (Obviously, that fell through.)