Crunchyroll has faced backlash after voice actor David Wald revealed the company has been illegally opening and distributing his fan mail for the past five years, violating U.S. federal law regarding obstruction of correspondence. This revelation sparked widespread outrage, highlighting Crunchyroll’s questionable practices, including its monopoly over anime distribution in the West following its acquisition by Sony. Critics argue that Crunchyroll has become complacent, exemplified by the failure of its original content and a significant price increase for subscriptions. Furthermore, Wald’s situation underscores broader issues within the company, such as alleged discrimination against voice actors and a toxic work environment. Crunchyroll’s response has been inadequate, stating they are investigating the matter but failing to acknowledge their responsibility. This incident adds to the growing list of grievances against Crunchyroll, raising concerns about the treatment of voice actors and the future of anime distribution.
Has anything good EVER come from big company acquisitions AT ALL?
Geocities -> acquired by Yahoo -> crap -> death
Youtube -> acquired by Google -> ad crap
Blogger -> acquired by Google -> crap
Macromedia -> acquired by Adobe -> Monopoly crap
Washington Post -> acquired by Bezos -> political crap
MySQL -> Acquired by Oracle -> copyright crap
Github -> acquired by Microsoft -> crap
Reddit -> acquired by Conde Nast -> political crap
Twitter -> acquired by Musk -> utter crap
Every single time I see a cool startup get bought by a big player, all I can see is the service going to shit.
Well yes. That’s the point. Cut costs (slash staff, quality, etc) then make as much money as you can as fast as you can off the goodwill and fan loyalty built up by the original product/service.
Vulture Capital doing what it does. Make everything shittier AND more expensive.
MySpace -> acquired by News Corporation -> insta death
Also, Twitter was always crap.
Just went down the rabbit-hole of the acquisition of MySQL as I was bored. What a fascinating story.
Dude who originally made it in 1995, Michael Widenius, named it after his daughter My, hence MySQL. He sold it to Sun for $1 billion in 2008. He then turned around, forked the software, and produced MariaDB (I always wondered why it was named that) starting a new organization around it in 2009. It’s functionally nearly identical, often able to be used as a drop in replacement, assuming you aren’t using new features developed after the fork. Last month, he sold it again, the same fucking base software, to some private equity firm (yay…). What a guy.
Unfortunately, he’s run out of daughters to name software after and already used his son’s name for something else, so we might be at the end of open-source, community-driven DB solutions from Michael. To be fair, relying on any projects from him to be free and open indefinitely is apparently not a good idea anyway.
I was just thinking today that any time i hear about a new company ill ask “are they publicly traded or planning to be?” I feel like thatll save a lot of time
Roster Teeth and Wizards of the Coast. Those turned out just cycling great.
Roster Teeth was in charge of their own demise.
Holden being acquired by General Motors was okay for a while. Then it died, because they couldn’t be stuffed with the Australian market, or the local car industry at the time (and in doing so, likely kicked off its demise).