The laborers made more money because of your idea while performing the same work. They are better off and still had no part in making the improvement.
Please explain how this "improvement" happened without the "laborers"
Those are just the low hanging fruits without any major impact to how work is done.
Stepping down into the internals of the business, it’s going to vary a lot but in manufacturing you spend time looking at high failure rate processes, bottlenecks, and single points of failure. Changing these with effectively no change to how individual laborers work is quite common and can significantly improve yield stability and throughput.
Going even lower level, it might be as simple as better insulation around a bake process resulting in 50% less energy.
You might be interested in reading about the improvements in steel mills where the labor required was reduced by an order of magnitude over the last 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_crisis
Improvements come without labor all of the time and it’s a frequent point of contention with the labor when it eliminates a role rather than acts as a force multiplier.
I couldn't have explained worker alienation better had I tried
> why not retain creative control of your ideas and make millions at the same time?
Because there are (a lot!) of people who are more interested in an equitable work than extracting fortunes for themselves.
Because you "make millions" on the backs of the people you string along, and not everybody wants that.
> Horray, effective altruism! You mean the thing that allows you to ignore any current problem in favor of pretend problems a hundred years out? And conveniently includes making yourself rich, which is of course only happening to fix said pretend problem. And, well, your life really pleasant on the backs of others, but that's a rounding error.
> Meanwhile, if you start a software co-op... who exactly are you helping? One option here is helping an industry that's currently setting itself up for a marvellous collapse because it treats open source as an opportunity to extract only. (Until the maintainers give up, and then there'll wailing and gnashing of teeth)
Another side is helping people live a more sustainable live. There's nothing wrong with a co-op to e.g. ensure health care and pensions. While working reasonable hours.
Could this fail? Probably. Maybe even likely, because co-op folks tend to be a bit more idealist, which makes business survival a bit harder.
But let's not pretend there aren't a lot of people who wouldn't be willing to join a co-op, or that it generates absolutely no benefit.