Ask HN: Who's the current “Don't Be Evil” corporation?
We all know that corporations sooner or later get into a spiral of enshittification and become a transnational data-grabbing, climate polluter, lock-in business problem.
However, some take longer to reach this point and we can at least enjoy their offerings in the mean time with less guilt.
So, what are the current least evil corporations?
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I’d also say at this exact moment, trust with tech execs writ large is low, given fairly universal layoff trends.
You mention several things: enshittification, data-collection, pollution, lock-in... What you don't mention is worst part: all capitalists/corporations are thiefs, they get a free ride off the backs of people who actually do the work. There's a reason it's called "wage slavery".
Also the reverse. There are plenty of aspects of the Democrat party that are appalling to independent voters.
At the end of the day Democrats and Republicans are relatively ossified, it's the independent voters that are in play.
He's an ex-Valve coder who's basically on a personal crusade against them, revealing a lot of internal politics and other unpleasant stuff. Last I checked, he intended to write a book about it.
I am not the kind of a person to care much about people's post history just to take a dig at them for it, and I am not judging him for being into it. This is all harmless and fine. But, sadly, the whole UFO conspiracy theory nonsense seriously undermines my trust in his takes on Valve and how things were actually going there.
Their regional pricing in Argentina is very generous. Most people here would be completely priced out of the industry if they didn't do this.
They had issues with abuse and they solved it requiring local addresses for payment methods instead of nuking us from orbit.
I don't know why they are doing this, a lot of companies have pulled out of country due to the fake dollar exchange rate thing.
And I'm wary of saying it's generous since it's a for profit company, but I don't know if our pricing is even worth the bandwidth, since a lot of them are like 1/10th.
We are really lucky Valve exists here, it's on a league of its own.
There are certainly evil undertones.
They may be _less_ evil, but not clear of all evils.
0: https://www.anthropic.com/company
If you're going to downvote, you should explain why huggingface is evil right now. They're literally the bastion of open source AI.
Huggingface may very well be perceived as neutral or unproven, and so qualifies as neither. (Just speculating).
> They're literally the bastion of open source AI.
I don't see how that affects the "evil or not" question at all.
Everything meaningful that huggingface does is open source. They are literally the atlas holding up NLP and diffusion models right now. They are the least evil company in tech right now by far.
But I disagree with that as the measure. There are OSS outfits that I think do evil.
I know nothing about Huggingface and so I'm not commenting on them specifically. I'm just speaking generally.
Corporate evilness is a function of market forces over time, as limited by culture. You'd have to look for a corporation whose market grows as a result of being good. For Google initially, to get people to trust it with email and search to get the scale required for its flywheel. Also note that any culture strong enough to resist market forces requires strong selection mechanisms if not group-think and sacrifice.
One example is Veeva, a public benefit corporation that does Java infrastructure for pharma trials. Even more than most enterprise X-AAS companies, they have a small number of large customers, so they grow by being compliant to their concerns. Normally competitors would not share infrastructure, but here it helps since the pharma companies both gain leverage against the FDA by having consistent processes, and share implementation of common FDA mandates. It helps that software infrastructure for trials is definitely not a differentiator in the market for drugs (though it can be a moat against competitors if properly designed).
The head of Veeva took this opportunity to remake the company as a public benefit corporation, with an internal culture of service (albeit with a managerial bias towards data-driven decisions circa 2018). Mostly experienced dev's with families.
A pure-culture play is Expensify, which does expense reporting. They know the business is not sexy, so they opted for a thoroughly employee-oriented culture to attract people who have a good work-life balance. They support work-anywhere and have had regular employee work retreats in various countries. They have their own tech stack, so it's insular both ways. Lots of younger wondering self-taught good people. A rare fintech success story.
Of course, the best example is Apple. Services and high prices notwithstanding, they decided to put themselves squarely behind the user instead of abusing them through ads and such. Famously strong culture, surprisingly decentralized, fantastic stack for the legacy and scale, etc. Apple is the only company I know of any size that intentionally shapes their market and inputs to do good. (Whether history will forgive them their benefits to China is another question.)