5 ms·

Not to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of human communication to police and

Not to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of human communication to police and curate absolutely everything that gets shared, according to a single prescribed narrative by their political partners, and their team of fact checkers complete with their implicit biases, who are funded by extreme partisan players who won the Elite Olympics™ with their nearly infinite wealth and sway.

shadowgovt 5y ago
It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."
- roughly 5y ago
  That’s because they don’t have to pay for externalities. If Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially, for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn’t be viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to operate at that scale). It’s only because they can dump the waste products of their enterprise into our collective psychological water supply without consequence that it appears like a profitable business.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    How do you quantify externalities of media? Do NYT and other progressive outlets share responsibility for looting during summer 2020 because they largely shared the views of demonstrators? If climate change anxiety is shown to be a large factor in psychological issues, do outlets covering climate change get held responsible for that psychological consequence?
- mschuster91 5y ago
  I can't blame them though. Networks of any kind have the particular effect of working the better, the more people are on it. What use is a messenger (cough Signal, Threema) if none of your contacts use them and can be persuaded to install yet-another-network app? The obvious solution would have been for governments to mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less "API"...
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I actually don't think it is that rare. Especially for smaller companies. I don't want 100% of the market. I want 10%, but I want the best 20% that can easily afford my product and doesn't complain, cancel, chargeback, or need unnecessary handholding to use my software. Beyond that it's mostly diminishing returns. Of course, I actually have a product that people want to pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from using it.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  I enjoy working for a company that realizes we'll never have the entire market and is fine with the fact that there is plenty of space for multiple competitors to do well. I've been at companies where "we want to be number 1, win all the awards, and defeat the competition" and I get where that comes from... a certain amount of that is healthy, but it can also get very twisted. I'd rather not.
- chongli 5y ago
  That's not true at all. Plenty of people run lifestyle businesses whose goal is to support themselves and their families, friends, and employees. One example is Aquarium Co-Op [1] who is into promoting the aquarium hobby in all its facets. Cory, the owner, is very frank about the costs of running his business and how he often sells products at or below cost because he believes they're important to the community. A far cry from big tech companies seemingly bent on world domination. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Aquariumcoop https://www.youtube.com/c/Aquariumcoop
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I think that's excellent and I wish Cory the best. Cragislist is another example I can think of where a company just set out to be small and charge what it needed to make its small employee-base comfortable, not dominate the world. ... but then I'm out of names, is my point. Most companies don't go this road. Perhaps that's because going the other road gathers enough resources to be big enough to make all the headlines, so we don't hear about the others.
    - chongli 5y ago
      I think you're generally going to run out if you try to think of household names. Instead, think local. I don't know about you but there are a lot of local family-run restaurants, bakeries, chocolatiers, furniture/carpentry stores, flower shops, consulting businesses, accounting/tax prep firms, game/hobby stores, boardgame cafes, independent movie theatres, etc. On and on the list goes, though unless you live here (Waterloo) you've probably never heard of any of them. And of course where I live is not special; you can find a similar variety in any city and even many towns or villages.
  - specialist 5y ago
    VC-funded corporations are more inclined towards world domination than co-ops.

shadowgovt 5y ago

It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."

roughly 5y ago
That’s because they don’t have to pay for externalities. If Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially, for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn’t be viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to operate at that scale). It’s only because they can dump the waste products of their enterprise into our collective psychological water supply without consequence that it appears like a profitable business.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  How do you quantify externalities of media? Do NYT and other progressive outlets share responsibility for looting during summer 2020 because they largely shared the views of demonstrators? If climate change anxiety is shown to be a large factor in psychological issues, do outlets covering climate change get held responsible for that psychological consequence?
mschuster91 5y ago
I can't blame them though. Networks of any kind have the particular effect of working the better, the more people are on it. What use is a messenger (cough Signal, Threema) if none of your contacts use them and can be persuaded to install yet-another-network app? The obvious solution would have been for governments to mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less "API"...
jjeaff 5y ago
I actually don't think it is that rare. Especially for smaller companies. I don't want 100% of the market. I want 10%, but I want the best 20% that can easily afford my product and doesn't complain, cancel, chargeback, or need unnecessary handholding to use my software. Beyond that it's mostly diminishing returns. Of course, I actually have a product that people want to pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from using it.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
I enjoy working for a company that realizes we'll never have the entire market and is fine with the fact that there is plenty of space for multiple competitors to do well. I've been at companies where "we want to be number 1, win all the awards, and defeat the competition" and I get where that comes from... a certain amount of that is healthy, but it can also get very twisted. I'd rather not.
chongli 5y ago
That's not true at all. Plenty of people run lifestyle businesses whose goal is to support themselves and their families, friends, and employees. One example is Aquarium Co-Op [1] who is into promoting the aquarium hobby in all its facets. Cory, the owner, is very frank about the costs of running his business and how he often sells products at or below cost because he believes they're important to the community. A far cry from big tech companies seemingly bent on world domination. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Aquariumcoop https://www.youtube.com/c/Aquariumcoop
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I think that's excellent and I wish Cory the best. Cragislist is another example I can think of where a company just set out to be small and charge what it needed to make its small employee-base comfortable, not dominate the world. ... but then I'm out of names, is my point. Most companies don't go this road. Perhaps that's because going the other road gathers enough resources to be big enough to make all the headlines, so we don't hear about the others.
  - chongli 5y ago
    I think you're generally going to run out if you try to think of household names. Instead, think local. I don't know about you but there are a lot of local family-run restaurants, bakeries, chocolatiers, furniture/carpentry stores, flower shops, consulting businesses, accounting/tax prep firms, game/hobby stores, boardgame cafes, independent movie theatres, etc. On and on the list goes, though unless you live here (Waterloo) you've probably never heard of any of them. And of course where I live is not special; you can find a similar variety in any city and even many towns or villages.
- specialist 5y ago
  VC-funded corporations are more inclined towards world domination than co-ops.