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Its not capitalism per se, when you are small you have to focus on your customers whether you like it or not but when you become big you can afford not to treat

by sumedh 3y ago

Its not capitalism per se, when you are small you have to focus on your customers whether you like it or not but when you become big you can afford not to treat your customers properly.

EGreg 3y ago
Ok how about this It’s capitalism for any business / platform that gets big And has shareholders that want profits
- tormeh 3y ago
  It’s less about size and more about moat, though most businesses with no moat tend to stay small. If you have a moat you have less competition so you can and will extract more profit.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    I would say size correlates rather strongly to bad incentives for the shareholder class vs society. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down M$ in High School and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Facemash and Facebook and was going to build an open-source, decentralized file sharing network (“Wirehog”) but the Venture Capitalists proudly “put a bullet in that thing”. Gotta extract them rents! I heard Sean Parker myself on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 telling the story. Sean likewise tried to make a file sharing economy (Napster), and got nailed for it by another set of really big monopoly-like organizations, in the music and movie industries. He learned his lesson of capitalism: don’t mess with the centralized control! Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, says like you: “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. That’s not hyperbole, that’s the actual title of his talk at Google, that I listened to. With such investors it is no wonder that Mark Z went from an open source bro to corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, makes unilateral decisions — moves fast, break things — and then says “calm down, breathe, we hear you.” Society has become like this (lonely, angry, addicted) not by accident. It is the end result of the system where shareholders and venture capitalists and the profit motive shape our platforms.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Anyone reading history or following world news will be well aware of that "power corrupts." Period. Capitalism is merely the modern fast means to power but even so its far from the only one. Kings are morally corrupt, politicians are morally corrupt, click bait thought leaders are morally corrupt, cult leaders are morally corrupt, etc, etc. There is always some proxy for social status and power which people will quiet literally kill for. Nowadays it's mostly money or at least it's the most accessible one.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    So the answer is to distribute power and not let it concentrate. The best is a gift economy with no profit motive. It creates more value for the world than its capitalist counterparts: 1) Wikipedia vs Britannica, Encarta, et al 2) VoIP vs Telcos 3) Linux vs closed systems like Sun, etc. 4) World Wide Web based on open protocols vs AOL, MSN, Compuserve They beat them within a decade. Gopher was good but started trying to use the government to control its licensing. It lost. Now, if you need an accounting system, that rewards ecosystem participants for storage, hosting, uptime/availability, computation, security, translating, moderating, whatever, then use decentralized crypto utility tokens based on open protocols. Micropayments can be done peer to peer via trustlines. It’s the proper use case for crypto. And it beats the current system of financing projects because the end result is more like 1) Ethereum for business logic 2) IPFS for storage etc. vs Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other centralized things. The rest — realtime chats, video, endless doomscrolling feeds it’s all gimmicks designed to get you addicted to centralized control. It’s not good for healthy society. Frankly, neither are celebrities who can tweet to 5 million followers at 3 in the morning. In true gift economies like Science, Wikipedia, Open Source software etc. people actually have to run the gauntlet of peer review for the privilege of having their ideas reach the public. That’s how it should be. Not polluting the public with mindless advertisement and smut and one sided news stories radicalizing them to hate and wars. Think about it. https://rational.app https://rational.app also goes into more detail on the economics of how we got here and how to get out.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

by sumedh 3y ago

Its not capitalism per se, when you are small you have to focus on your customers whether you like it or not but when you become big you can afford not to treat your customers properly.

EGreg 3y ago

Ok how about this It’s capitalism for any business / platform that gets big And has shareholders that want profits

tormeh 3y ago
It’s less about size and more about moat, though most businesses with no moat tend to stay small. If you have a moat you have less competition so you can and will extract more profit.
- EGreg 3y ago
  I would say size correlates rather strongly to bad incentives for the shareholder class vs society. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down M$ in High School and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Facemash and Facebook and was going to build an open-source, decentralized file sharing network (“Wirehog”) but the Venture Capitalists proudly “put a bullet in that thing”. Gotta extract them rents! I heard Sean Parker myself on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 telling the story. Sean likewise tried to make a file sharing economy (Napster), and got nailed for it by another set of really big monopoly-like organizations, in the music and movie industries. He learned his lesson of capitalism: don’t mess with the centralized control! Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, says like you: “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. That’s not hyperbole, that’s the actual title of his talk at Google, that I listened to. With such investors it is no wonder that Mark Z went from an open source bro to corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, makes unilateral decisions — moves fast, break things — and then says “calm down, breathe, we hear you.” Society has become like this (lonely, angry, addicted) not by accident. It is the end result of the system where shareholders and venture capitalists and the profit motive shape our platforms.
marcinzm 3y ago
Anyone reading history or following world news will be well aware of that "power corrupts." Period. Capitalism is merely the modern fast means to power but even so its far from the only one. Kings are morally corrupt, politicians are morally corrupt, click bait thought leaders are morally corrupt, cult leaders are morally corrupt, etc, etc. There is always some proxy for social status and power which people will quiet literally kill for. Nowadays it's mostly money or at least it's the most accessible one.
- EGreg 3y ago
  So the answer is to distribute power and not let it concentrate. The best is a gift economy with no profit motive. It creates more value for the world than its capitalist counterparts: 1) Wikipedia vs Britannica, Encarta, et al 2) VoIP vs Telcos 3) Linux vs closed systems like Sun, etc. 4) World Wide Web based on open protocols vs AOL, MSN, Compuserve They beat them within a decade. Gopher was good but started trying to use the government to control its licensing. It lost. Now, if you need an accounting system, that rewards ecosystem participants for storage, hosting, uptime/availability, computation, security, translating, moderating, whatever, then use decentralized crypto utility tokens based on open protocols. Micropayments can be done peer to peer via trustlines. It’s the proper use case for crypto. And it beats the current system of financing projects because the end result is more like 1) Ethereum for business logic 2) IPFS for storage etc. vs Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other centralized things. The rest — realtime chats, video, endless doomscrolling feeds it’s all gimmicks designed to get you addicted to centralized control. It’s not good for healthy society. Frankly, neither are celebrities who can tweet to 5 million followers at 3 in the morning. In true gift economies like Science, Wikipedia, Open Source software etc. people actually have to run the gauntlet of peer review for the privilege of having their ideas reach the public. That’s how it should be. Not polluting the public with mindless advertisement and smut and one sided news stories radicalizing them to hate and wars. Think about it. https://rational.app https://rational.app also goes into more detail on the economics of how we got here and how to get out.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]