5 ms·
All good things don't last forever. A organization or company lasting forever with the same goal/mission while using the same methods is a statistical anomaly.
by sudo_cowsay 2mo ago
All good things don't last forever. A organization or company lasting forever with the same goal/mission while using the same methods is a statistical anomaly.
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoWhat is the corrupting force?
- mgiampapa 2mo agoUsually money.
- shermantanktop 2mo agoOften preceded by the waning of the passion and self sacrifice that enables things to happen without money. It’s sad when it’s asymmetric - founders lose their idealism and sell out while early employees fail to notice the game has changed. But dreams are rarely enough to keep things going. And VCs know just what to say to make it seem like the dream and the money can coexist.
- bigiain 2mo agoYep. It can be power - see Reddit and Wikipedia mods - but it's usually money. And once VC fundraising is involved, it's pretty much always money.
- tptacek 2mo agoWhich is another way to say "viability".
- doc_ick 2mo agoNot always.
- sudo_cowsay 2mo agoThe joy/energy and human element being reduced. Or sometimes it's profit greed. Or it could just be due to economic conditions at the time. There are lots of ways for organizations to fall. Pick your poison.
- strictnein 2mo agoThe people who cared leave and are replaced by people who just want a job.
- DonHopkins 2mo ago"You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." -- Jamie Zawinski
- natmaka 2mo agoBureaucracy is a major one, as it tends to dissipate more and more resources to sustain its own infrastructure, neglecting the core mission (J. Pournelle's Law).
- dbspin 2mo agoThe investors.
- movpasd 2mo agoIt's just economics. VCs dump large amounts of money into early-stage platforms with the express purpose of exploiting it later. This is an inevitable part of the lifecycle of high capital, low margin industries with strong network effects. This is not VCs being evil and corrupting a pristine engineer- or hacker-defined concept of true value. The VCs are all following the rules and are trying to make money off of risky investments (it's "venture" capital, after all). But the incentive structure just forces the market into either an oligopoly of largely extractive services (or into everything being free: that's why open source is also a stable point for software). My hope is that in time, basic software services, like for communication, socialising, community hosting, and so on, will eventually become seen as core social infrastructure. I don't really think this can happen via existing institutions, even open source, because the fixed costs of making software are really high. You really need _tax_ to support this. But it's very difficult to do because the internet cuts across borders.
- inigyou 2mo agoEntropy. Game theory.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- momojo 2mo agoThe brokenness of man? Sin?