From going public? What do you have against that?

Shareholders optimize for money, users don't like themselves and the things they use to be optimized for money. They rather have good service. Since the perfect product earns you max money with min features, these two priorities are opposed.

I get what you're saying, but I’m not sure it’s fully true. If it were true, then all public companies would be bad (using bad in a loose sense here). I think Apple, for example, has a good balance between optimizing money and product.

Well, maybe only in the sense that you still seem to be willing to buy. But the amount of people willing to pay the apple tax seems to be shrinking lately, considering recent reports of low sw quality and let's also throw in the 4-digit monitor stand stunt.

The quality of Apple's own software is terrible nowadays, they are a prime example of this erosion of end user value.

>then all public companies would be bad

That would be correct

No service has ever, ever, ever actually improved after its company went public.

Google search continued improving for a while after a Google went public.

And yet here we are...

And then what happened?

Since you put three evers - Amazon went public on May 15, 1997. If you can say it hasn’t improved since 1997, with a straight face, I’d be convinced you’re a few bats shy of a belfry.

Amazon wasn’t a service. It was a retailer. And I can’t 100.0% guarantee that I won’t get a counterfeit if I order today, so I don’t consider that an improvement, overall.

Shipping got way faster though

If we're using the metric "garbage I was tricked into purchasing arrives faster", then yes, Amazon is a tremendous success story.

Guaranteed eventual enshitification?

Privately owned: probable eventual enshitification.

Publicly owned: guaranteed eventual enshitification.

It will turn discord into shit

Shareholders are the prime driver behind enshittification of platforms. Because they hold earnings calls every quarter and make the team extract more and more rents from their ecosystem, to make number go up.

But hey, the shareholder game already started when VCs bought in. I support every company developing a way for utility tokenholders to buy out shareholders. That way we fairly buy out the parasitic shareholder class so we eliminate the main incentives for enshittification!

Once shareholders are involved it's no longer enough for the company to make enough profit to sustain itself, it now needs to make more profit each year.

There might be a period of growth in the beginning when investment leads to development of new features and refining the platform, and more users join. But eventually it hits a point of maximum market saturation. The product is as feature rich as it can be, the user numbers have reached their limit.

It's at that point that enshittification begins. More ads, the minimum amount of money spent to maintain the system, locking features behind premium subscriptions, prices go up. Just look at youtube, netflix etc. At this point youtube in particular has become unusable, and the content is nothing like the stuff you used to watch on there, it's all long video essays full of sponsors as that's what the company promotes and encourages, but not what people really want to see.

It is the first step towards enshittification.

Shareholders expect constant growth which will lead to reality-disconnected PMs forcing dumb feature after dumb feature down the users throat until the very codebase of discord will rot and bloat.

That's not really how that works. Having good revenue prospects is traditionally a pre-req for going public (notwithstanding some tech exceptions)

Having a good revenue stream is also a pre-req for staying private long term.

I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do (not that private companies don't do this, it just doesn't seem like they generally do it as consistently and to the same extent as public companies). Subjectively I've found acquisitions or IPOs are often a bad sign for product quality.

> I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do

I think that is largely because we remember the ones that do and not the ones that don't.

As an example, companies like microsoft & amazon, while ruthless, don't really fit that mold.

Exactly this. If a company isn't bringing in enough money to support their service, they are going to look to other sources. Those sources aren't just free money though, but the company can take that influx of cash and spend it on implementing things that do make money. And these money-making strategies have to be far more aggressive because not only does the company now need to make enough to keep everything running and their employees paid, but it also needs to make extra on top of that so that investors can see a return.