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Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

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confluence·

Can someone with more knowledge explain the reasoning behind this?

Unfortunately I'm at a loss : (

Congrats to the social cam team though - good to see a justin.tv export doing so well.

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Traffic inflation via user manipulation => Lots of spam traffic => People hate it but because it's spammy it still gets traffic => Socialcam guys realizes nothing good will come out of the situation => A fool approaches => Sell.

No one's hurt--the founder's made money, the investors made money--except for the users who found out more than they needed to (and wanted to) know about their friends and family, such as a daughter finding out their dad watched bunch of bikini videos and wet tshirt contest videos, etc.

I think the OP was talking about why Autodesk is buying a social media company.

Yeah, that's my question too.

SocialCam is a 'social media' company? Serious question. I've always felt it was more of a link/video spam site that holds barely any original content - just a long chain of forwarding/referral links.

It's collects media (video) and shares it (social), so I think it would be considered a social media company. Honestly, not too worried about the semantics here, the point is that it has nothing to do with 3D modeling/manipulation software. Buying for customers? Talent acquisition? Revenue acquisition? It's an odd one for sure...

Autodesk is getting into the consumer space, trying to build a community of creators via acquisition. Another example of this strategy was the Instructables acquisition last year.

I don't know what they specifically plan to do with SocialCam but I'm sure it fits into this consumer community strategy in some way.

I would imagine it is a talent acquisition. Autodesk has been trying to hire for a new cloud team in Detroit and San Francisco for a while...without luck, I think. (I was a reject)

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