4 ms·

Capitalism. I know. I know. but hear me out. Current dynamics for publicly listed companies doom them to provide growth every year - but not only does growth g

by gmerc 3y ago

Capitalism. I know. I know. but hear me out. Current dynamics for publicly listed companies doom them to provide growth every year - but not only does growth get harder every year - especially when the demographic curve tilts downwards, it also becomes more expensive. 3 nm chips are orders of magnitude harder to improve upon them 5mn chips for example. VW Dieselgate, Explosing Samsung Phones, CPU Branch prediction vulnerabilities, Boeing planes dropping from the skies, all have things in common - large industry players that have reached serious growth limits and act under pressure to deliver it anyway. But shareholder doesn’t care. So your only choice eventually for businesses that can’t be improved upon effectively enough to maintain growth (eventually all of them) is to be innovative with fees and, if you’ve monopolized something, exploit that. Enshittification is built into the system. All good things must become shit over time.

FreshStart 3y ago
Unless socialism holds it at gunpoint.
yummypaint 3y ago
Enshittification is built into the system. All good things must become shit over time. All commercial things are subject to these pressures. Open source projects are not. We need to decomercialize everything that we can.
- linguae 3y ago
  It depends on the open source project. Not all open source projects are community-driven or are controlled by benevolent dictators; there are some open source projects that are developed by companies selling products and services using those projects (e.g., Red Hat, various database companies before they started switching to non-FOSS source-available licenses), and there are open source projects that are supported by academic institutions and public-sector laboratories. The open source world is not immune to economic pressures. Even the hobbyist donating code still needs to make a living. Thus it’s possible for some open source projects to still undergo “enshittification” if economic pressures influence the maintainers of these projects accordingly.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  A lot of open source sucks. Think about it. The model is a mirror of how government works. Either you only only solve specific bullet points instead of a holistic solution(many open source apps being more convoluted to use vs closed source competitors) or you suffer from the "too many cooks" problem and you end up with a mess of a project (eg. Desktop Linux and all its problems)
  - yummypaint 3y ago
    I don't think it's fair refer to "desktop linux" as a monolith. It's really lots of independent developers and teams offering a broad diversity of solutions to common compute problems. Having a pool of possible solutions means that some will innevitably be worse for a given use case, but this is a strength overall. The other side of the coin is that commercial software also sucks in general, but users of commercial software often have no choice in the matter and are being held hostage by vendor lock-in.
prepend 3y ago
I don’t think this is capitalism per se, unless you think that being greedy and short sighted is a key capitalist concept. I know it’s hard to boil down what capitalism is, but to me it seems be markets, competition, incentive-based invisible hands type controls, and flow of capital. This behavior is really the opposite as it’s really just rent seeking of locking people into your thing and then turning the screws. I don’t think enshittification is unique or even more likely in capitalism and seems more likely to exist with heavy, conscious regulation as companies will minmax to stay in the rules and make the most money. So just say “capitalism, sucks eh?” seems to make it harder to correct this behavior. It seems like the current rules we have need fixing to correct against companies limiting their market and locking people in. US airlines aren’t really a good example of “capitalism” since it’s just a few companies with little competition (eg, check out how many airlines really compete over routes and just settle for “united cities” and “delta cities”).

by gmerc 3y ago

FreshStart 3y ago

Unless socialism holds it at gunpoint.

yummypaint 3y ago

Enshittification is built into the system. All good things must become shit over time. All commercial things are subject to these pressures. Open source projects are not. We need to decomercialize everything that we can.

linguae 3y ago
It depends on the open source project. Not all open source projects are community-driven or are controlled by benevolent dictators; there are some open source projects that are developed by companies selling products and services using those projects (e.g., Red Hat, various database companies before they started switching to non-FOSS source-available licenses), and there are open source projects that are supported by academic institutions and public-sector laboratories. The open source world is not immune to economic pressures. Even the hobbyist donating code still needs to make a living. Thus it’s possible for some open source projects to still undergo “enshittification” if economic pressures influence the maintainers of these projects accordingly.
nebula8804 3y ago
A lot of open source sucks. Think about it. The model is a mirror of how government works. Either you only only solve specific bullet points instead of a holistic solution(many open source apps being more convoluted to use vs closed source competitors) or you suffer from the "too many cooks" problem and you end up with a mess of a project (eg. Desktop Linux and all its problems)
- yummypaint 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair refer to "desktop linux" as a monolith. It's really lots of independent developers and teams offering a broad diversity of solutions to common compute problems. Having a pool of possible solutions means that some will innevitably be worse for a given use case, but this is a strength overall. The other side of the coin is that commercial software also sucks in general, but users of commercial software often have no choice in the matter and are being held hostage by vendor lock-in.

prepend 3y ago

I don’t think this is capitalism per se, unless you think that being greedy and short sighted is a key capitalist concept. I know it’s hard to boil down what capitalism is, but to me it seems be markets, competition, incentive-based invisible hands type controls, and flow of capital. This behavior is really the opposite as it’s really just rent seeking of locking people into your thing and then turning the screws. I don’t think enshittification is unique or even more likely in capitalism and seems more likely to exist with heavy, conscious regulation as companies will minmax to stay in the rules and make the most money. So just say “capitalism, sucks eh?” seems to make it harder to correct this behavior. It seems like the current rules we have need fixing to correct against companies limiting their market and locking people in. US airlines aren’t really a good example of “capitalism” since it’s just a few companies with little competition (eg, check out how many airlines really compete over routes and just settle for “united cities” and “delta cities”).