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How about running ads but not letting them dominate your product? I see nothing wrong with running a costs-plus business model but VC comes in and demand all th

by tomc1985 5y ago

How about running ads but not letting them dominate your product? I see nothing wrong with running a costs-plus business model but VC comes in and demand all these stupid companies dominate the world so they can get their 500x return or whatever. Then they go public and now the only thing that matters is shareholder value, fuck the users and OG supporters... Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and it ends up getting perverted into the hellscape that is tech today. Every damn time.

pm90 5y ago
Its really really hard for a company whose ultimate goal is profit, to give up opportunities to do so. Its just not gonna happen. You can have all the ethical people you want, but people change and it takes just one "smart" engineer/product manager to realize how much money is on the table, then use that to grab power and get the same changes everywhere. Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  I get that, but there is something very wrong with business culture if that is the only outcome guaranteed. There are lots of examples of successful companies whose business model is not based around the unrestrained pursuit of pure profit at the expense of customers... look at Nintendo, for example, or Disney.
- EarthLaunch 5y ago
  > Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I don't think it's hard per-se. I think it's hard if you have investors. I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employees, in order to have a company which doesn't actively psychologically harm its users, a less stressful working environment. Gumroad is the perfect example of this. The problems come from VC money, which force a company to chase 500x returns or die trying. More in general, whenever there is centralisation of resources, problems ensue at some point later on. Regulations are not the answer - established companies find a way to arginate them (look at Google playing with cookies), smaller companies trying to go live and compete have a slower time to market and die, benefiting the established companies. On top of this regulations introduce a different set of problems. What if I'm okay being on a website which doesn't respect my privacy? What if I care more about reading a news article and never visit that website again more than I care about them respecting some rules regarding what kind of tracking they do? Instead of assuming we, the lawmakers, are omniscient and perfect, I think we should just get out of the way of the market and limit governmental influence to reduce the number of monopolies and corruption that gets into the real world - and then bubbles up in various ways, chasing infinte growth being one of them. To 100 more Gumroads.

pm90 5y ago

Its really really hard for a company whose ultimate goal is profit, to give up opportunities to do so. Its just not gonna happen. You can have all the ethical people you want, but people change and it takes just one "smart" engineer/product manager to realize how much money is on the table, then use that to grab power and get the same changes everywhere. Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.

tomc1985 5y ago
I get that, but there is something very wrong with business culture if that is the only outcome guaranteed. There are lots of examples of successful companies whose business model is not based around the unrestrained pursuit of pure profit at the expense of customers... look at Nintendo, for example, or Disney.
EarthLaunch 5y ago
> Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
I don't think it's hard per-se. I think it's hard if you have investors. I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employees, in order to have a company which doesn't actively psychologically harm its users, a less stressful working environment. Gumroad is the perfect example of this. The problems come from VC money, which force a company to chase 500x returns or die trying. More in general, whenever there is centralisation of resources, problems ensue at some point later on. Regulations are not the answer - established companies find a way to arginate them (look at Google playing with cookies), smaller companies trying to go live and compete have a slower time to market and die, benefiting the established companies. On top of this regulations introduce a different set of problems. What if I'm okay being on a website which doesn't respect my privacy? What if I care more about reading a news article and never visit that website again more than I care about them respecting some rules regarding what kind of tracking they do? Instead of assuming we, the lawmakers, are omniscient and perfect, I think we should just get out of the way of the market and limit governmental influence to reduce the number of monopolies and corruption that gets into the real world - and then bubbles up in various ways, chasing infinte growth being one of them. To 100 more Gumroads.