I don’t know, it’s looking like most people prefer businesses that eschew profits.
Yea my business-101 textbook says businesses should run a profit, but my sociology-101 textbook says we should do things that are good for people.
Maybe Reddit (et al) should be recreated as non profits dedicated to community building… before Facebook becomes the sole source of internet social interaction.
The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
This entire thread is proof. The entire thread is platforms that people liked started to suck as soon as they decided to make a profit.
Sure theoretically profitable businesses can be good for people, but I’m not holding my breath for an example.
> The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
Scarce resources is a cute textbook term but very few things in society, especially on the internet, are scarce. Profits must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your customers. So it’s almost tautological that profits are bad for customers.
Reddit was built on free content from unpaid users being moderated by unpaid mods for the benefit of the community. Reddit is discovering that they can’t charge for a scarce resource they don’t own. The scarcity wasn’t internet bandwidth or servers or engineering efforts. The scarce resources were community contributions by users and mods.
It’s only starting to matter now because those fictional numbers are starting to become very real, very fast, given the current state of interest rates.
hmm... if only there were... I don't know... some way to offer users to pay for a quality experience and subsidize that income with advertisements and reasonable API usage fees?
no, that couldn't possibly work! I mean, look at Wikipedia...
oh. right.
Tech companies over hired for ~10 years wrt efficiency , and few want to do layoffs necessary to get 'good' efficiency numbers, just close enough that they can maybe reach them in a few years, and hole things change in the meanwhile
It's natural: market funded inefficient growth for years, and tech people want to feel like they are succeeding, which headcount is a power-tripping and physical metric for, even if wildly inaccurate
Business types want you to think they're tidying up, but most are using this zeitgeist as an opportunity for greed and the chance to shift more power away from workers.
While it is possible to run a company at a loss with extremely high revenue, contextually, you're making excuses for a company that could easily keep running with 2.8 Billion dollars yearly.
It's likely that after they extract more money from creators they will increase their spend more to maintain operating at a loss.
Otherwise it's just wild speculation.
Which regulations specifically are you talking about and what makes it “near impossible technically to fulfill” them?
I'm hopeful that if companies start making money, we will start seeing competition again.