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.
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.