What private companies are you happy doing business with?
I'm increasingly of the opinion that most publicly owned companies either have lower quality services and products or eventually will. It may not matter in the end for most people as long as they can get what they need but personally if I have a choice I'd rather do business with companies not being traded with the hope that they can still operate without feeling like they need to go public to survive. There must still be a lot of privately owned companies that do prioritize customers instead of shareholders but with the constant churn of selloffs and takeovers it can be hard to keep track of.
The only popular one I can think of right now that I do regular business with is Valve Software. What are some other private companies that you are happy to support?
Valve, hands down. I'm sure others will agree, they're probably the best private company that most people will ever do business with. Sometimes it feels like to me that they are the only large company left that actually cares about the end user's experience. Not just in the software, but also in support.
They also happen to be the most profitable company in the world per employee
Which I think really speaks to their business model and the fact that there is value in producing a quality product and caring about the consumer.
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Note: there is a darker side - the skin gambling and loot box issues that imo valve has not done enough to curb
The excellent YouTube channel People Make Games did a two-part documentary on Valve. Part 1 focuses on exactly what you mentioned, the gambling and loot box issues. And Part 2 focuses on the employees and what it's like to work there. Highly recommend them both. I'm still a huge fan of Valve's products and their customer-service. But those videos definitely shed a different light on them for me personally.
slight edit: got the parts mixed up
Yeah it really is a shame Valve has allowed and even implicitly promoted such a degenerate problem on their platform. I understand that money printer go brrr, but it really seems like Valve could afford to not allow this and still make all the money in the world.
I mostly agree with you, however I do have a minor gripe that is kind of selfish.
So the company I currently work for used to do a lot of business for Valve, a lot of the packaging and marketing materials for everything from the original steam deck to internal valve initiatives.
However in recent years they moved all production to China.
I get the cost of going to China because I've worked in sourcing, licensing, and manufacturing, so truly I get it.
But for being a privately owned company and how incredibly valued Valve is and how much money they make, I wish they'd support their local and American owned businesses, especially ones like us that have supported them over the years.
Especially because we're also super passionate about Valve and their products. We genuinely looked forward to working with them and always pulled all the stops for them.
I have my reservations about Valve praise ; everyone always seems to omit they're the ones responsible for introducing several major predatory monetization schemes to the market with TF2and CSGO.
And they're also de facto a monopoly on PC gaming, which is not something you want as a consumer.
Furthermore, I find that some of valves failings tend to get pinned on Epic games. Some will nitpick over every little problem with Epic and give Steam a pass. While epic isn't great, it's nice to have competition.
And while it also has issues, I would rate Valve as "Mostly positive".
King Arthur Baking Company
They are 100% employee owned through employee stock ownership plan, where eligible employees earn/accrue company stock over time. It is very rare to see this type of model today in the United States, but it aligns with how I wish more companies were structured.
They also make excellent flour.
They do more than make excellent flour, they publish a huge range of great quality recipes on their site that they develop, and host a baker's hotline that you can call and get live support from real people on whatever you need help with when baking.
I was going to say this. It's one of the few websites from brands that I bother going to. Their recipes aren't revenue generators so none of the rambling backstory and ads, just classic recipes that work well. I go there first for anything baking related.
I don't know... I have to think that the recipes are at least sort of revenue generating - certainly not directly but I also think that the recipe department is functionally King Arthur's advertising department. I know that for myself, I generally grab King Arthur because they make good flour but also because they produce so many good recipes that are tested with their flour that also happens to be labeled and differentiated in ways that other nationally available flours are not (gluten content, for example). I have to think that the confluence of those three things - good product, tested labeling, tested recipes - is responsible for revenue generation.
Of course the recipes are there to influence people to consume more baked products, ideally from that brand. What Slade meant (correct me if I am wrong, please) is that there is a difference between providing helpful information that may lead to a sale and disguising pure advertising as information.
In other words, if I am a toolmaker and I publish a web compendium of useful niche tools, some of which I don't even make, this would be a boon to tool users, whereas if I published a web compendium of how to use my screwdrivers as ice picks, back scratchers, and tiny spears, I am fully focused on increasing my sales rather than providing true value to my customers.
Right, I think that King Arthur makes both a bunch of screwdrivers and the book on how to use a bunch of different screwdrivers. Functionally, most of the recipes are "we make a posidrive screwdriver and this recipe is for posidrive screws, so functionally you can use a phillips head and it will be ok or a flathead and it could work." The value is that the recipe is tested for posidrive drivers and King Arthur makes the screwdrivers labeled posidrive. They are providing helpful information AND driving a sale through a form of advertising.
My first step for making any baked good is usually to check King Arthur's recipe as a baseline!
They also have an incredibly extensive list of ingredient volume to weight conversions if you run into recipes that haven't already had the ingredient weights listed. It's saved my butt more than once.
I’d love to see more well known successful companies with this sort of structure. It just seems like the right incentive structure for a sustainable company with a good product
Ocean spray, the cranberry company, is also a cooperative owned by its member farmers. Don't know of any others on store shelves, but we always go out of our way to buy from those two companies.
Similarly, Darigold and the Tilamook brands are both owned by member farmers.
I grew up not too far from Tilamook and remember taking a tour of their Ice Cream/cheese factory when I was a small kid. I was a bit bummed as the last time I was in the area as it was closed due to COVID, so I wasn't able to take a tour. I'm hoping when I bring my kids to visit the area, I'll be able to take them since I think they'd find it really cool.
Wow I never would’ve guessed. Good to know!
As hyper-capitalist as it is, this is the standard operating procedure of Silicon Valley. Employees expect to get paid partially in company stock if it's post-IPO, or stock options if before. When I first moved here the first company I worked for had everyone from the department heads to the people doing customer support over the phone get stock options.
Of course the VCs and founders will almost always end up with most of the stock.
Giving your employees stock is not the same thing as an employee owned cooperative.
Yeah, thats where the bad incentives come from.
Bob's Red Mill has a similar ownership structure. And great products as well.
How does this work when employees quit, retire, or get fired? Are they required to sell their stock beforehand?
FYI it took me a moment to realise you mean publicly traded companies, not ones that were nationalised and owned by the people.
I think it’s worth saying that being a private company is not a panacea. I used to work for The Wonderful Company. Despite the name, they were not wonderful. They were far from the worst company I have worked with, but definitely not wonderful. It was privately owned by Stuart and Linda Resnick.
Here is a good example. It’s an employee owned cooperative, not private, but it is a similar idea. It’s called Oliver’s Market, and it’s the best damn grocery store I have ever been to. Some locals complain that it’s too expensive, but I don’t think it actually is. If you buy quality food from other grocery stores, Oliver’s actually ends up being cheaper. It’s just that Oliver’s doesn’t stock the bottom of the barrel crap that you probably shouldn’t be buying anyway. All around a fantastic company.
Yeah I've no doubt there are tons of private companies that are happy to make a quick buck screwing people over and I didn't mean to suggest they are always better. It just seems to me even the best managed public companies tend to put customer needs behind shareholders.
I think things turn out best when the incentives for shareholders can be aligned with the incentives for consumers. You can see this pretty clearly with certain companies like Apple, which was mentioned in the now deleted comment.
For their hardware, especially lower end hardware, Apple’s incentives align well with customers. iPhones come out every year with decent improvements and are a fantastic value, especially when you consider the support length. The lower priced Macintoshes are some of the best computers you can buy.
But for things like services, in particular the App Store 30% fee, Apple’s incentives are the opposite of what is good for the consumer. That is how we get all the anticompetitive decisions that Apple makes, and their malicious compliance to the EU DMA.
Ultimately the incentives for a private and public company are identical, it’s just that public company incentives are stronger.
Are they really? I'm not saying they're bad, clearly they're good, but after experiencing how franky completely okay many low-end Android phones have been in the recent years at least, around here (Europe, so apple stuff may be more expensive) sold for less than 1/3 of the price of the cheapest iPhone model, fantastic value is not something I'd use.
Again, they're good, but aren't Macbooks quite overpriced for their hardware and designed to be very difficult to repair? Or has that changed recently, or are we talking about desktops?
I hate to "well akchually" on this in particular because I despise walled gardens (it's one of the main reasons why I don't own any Apple products, no idea what I'll do if Google succeeds in moving in that direction as well), but Appstore's big advantage for the consumer is tighter control and more curation. It has way less bullshit adware or straight up malicious nonsense than Goole Play store.
I switched to apple after using and loving Android for years. I switched in 2020. The App Store might have slightly less adware and malicious products, but not by much. There are numerous apps that try to trick kids into purchasing a $10/week subscription to a shitty mobile game with their parents credit card. It takes so little searching to find an app that explicitly breaks apples listed rules on the App Store. Apples incentive to remove them is nearly zero, since they make 30% of those ridiculous subscription fees. This misaligned incentives also shows in other products like them destroying the usability of the apple TV apps to sell their subscription service.
With regard to iPhones being good products, I stand by this. Are they the best deal you can find? Nope. But are they a good value? Yes. Don’t forget that Apple devices get software support for far longer than any Android devices on the market. Google keeps promising longer support, but doesn’t actually support they devices they already have sold. When I switched to the iPhone, I switched from the Galaxy s10e to the iPhone 6s+. The iPhone was far older, but had consistently better day to day performance than the 1 year old Samsung. When I had bought the s10e, the contemporary iPhone was the 11, which is still supported. The s10e is definitely not.
As for Macs being a good value, I stand by that too. Before Apple silicon happened, I comparison shopped Mac laptops to the equivalent pc laptops. If you actually got similar specs, the pc laptops were within $100 difference of the macs (with some of the PCs being more expensive). People view macs as a poor value because they don’t serve the low cost market with new devices. But if you actually compare them correctly, they are quite reasonably priced. And everything changed when the Apple silicon attacked. If you haven’t used one, it’s hard to convey just how good Apple silicon is. They are super powerful, and still manage to sip battery life. The only thing close is the snapdragon windows laptops, but Apple silicon still runs laps around those chips. The base model Mac mini is pretty much the best value computer money can buy right now.
I can't really argue against that, because I keep buying the damn things, and the package as a whole is better than anything else I know of on the market - but I also can't in good conscience think of them as reasonably priced when they deliberately underspec the base models for price anchoring, and then gouge to a ridiculous degree on the storage and RAM upgrades you need to make it a worthwhile purchase.
I love Apple products but I have to agree on the overpriced RAM. As someone who needs a lot, my solution is to buy my devices second-hand from a private seller who hasn't used the device much and represents a certain demographic (someone responsible and tidy with a lot of respect for tech gadgets and the self-control to treat them lovingly).
The price will be fair for what I'm getting, Apple isn't getting my money (unless/until one day they stop overpricing), and I get to observe which models stand the test of time better than others before buying. These types of people usually sell their lightly used device whenever a new model is published and they absolutely must have it. By then there's a lot of information online regarding the real life drawbacks of whatever I'm considering to get. I've decided several times to just not get anything because the lineup wasn't good enough at the time. I ended up holding on to my Mid-2015 model until I finally got an M1 Pro Max about two years ago, which I'll probably still be happy with for a number of years.
This system allowed me to completely skip the no ports era of Apple laptops. The only thing I had to give up on is waiting for a model that would be as repairable as the Mid-2015. It's assembled by screws and I have a replacement keyboard in store waiting to be put in. The battery pack I've already replaced once. I still run my Adobe CS6 (with a perpetual license) on that machine.
It's the best of all worlds! And in the spirit of this topic, it allows me to not hand out money to a publicly traded company.
I think that you have cut into a really important groove on this topic: buy used. As much as I do think it is vitally important to have a list of companies, both pubic and private, that we can feel good (or at least no bad) about spending money with, ultimately, the answer to many of our current issues can be "spend less." Less consumerism, less spending competition, fewer cyclical upgrades... all are good for us as individuals. Part of engaging in less consumption can be buying used and actually considering when things need to be purchased. Which leads me to the more off-topic part:
Off topic: I am not generally a fan of Apple (or any other company, I try not to be a fan of any company) but holy shit, Apple really knocked it out of the park with the M1 chip. Maybe to their own detriment, the improvements realized by even the base M1 are so drastic that the relatively lower improvements of each iteration since leave little reason to upgrade beyond that in the near future. Your M1 Pro Max (insane name.) will be so good for so long that I am fairly envious. Of course, were it more repairable, the machine would be basically the only laptop anyone would ever need.
I don't think I want a list of any of the pubic companies.
I am interested in what you mean and why you don't want that list.
Just that there was a typo, haha.
Alright, lessons learned! The thing with Appstore curation definitely used to be true, but obviously isn't anymore, too bad.
With regards to Android phone performance, I've only ever used one flagship phone and since then I've been happy with "low end of the midrange", phones that cost half of what iPhones cost. They're fast enough to not annoy me in any way and the only difference I mind is that flagship phones always get much better tuned camera software, which dictates photo quality no matter which one has better hardware. With regards to long term support, perhaps this is the most ignorant or naive thing I'll say here, but I've never had a security problem with any phone ever. I'm using a phone released in 2021 with no issues, previous one was a similar situation.
I disagree with Macs being good value before the switch to ARM, but yeah, I agree that their switch to ARM has been really cool and I hope we get some competitors in time. The downside is that software needs more work to fully utilize the different platform, but that is improving all the time. IIRC the really bad serviceability is still an issue in the laptops though.
Unfortunately at least half of the software I use does not run on a Mac, plus I tend to use old specialized software (and also old games) and Mac OS's backwards compatibility is by far the worst of all desktop platforms, which makes it unusable for me.
The repairability issue is one point that I won’t ever try to defend Apple on. It’s just bad. And the worst part is that other manufacturers just seem to follow Apple in this. If I didn’t like macOS as much as I do, the only laptop I would ever buy is a framework.
I will say that Apple has made some interesting advancements in iPhone repairability. This is right after they made them extremely unrepairable, but they are nonetheless advancements. For example, I believe the iPhone 13 was the first glass sandwich style device that could be opened from both sides. Previous iterations could only be opened from the front or back, making replacement of one slab of glass incredibly difficult. All phones, including androids, had to choose to make a screen replacement easy or a back glass replacement easy. iPhone has both be easy. I don’t know if this advancement has been copied by Android manufacturers yet.
This might be the first time I've ever seen anyone say that Apple is pro-consumer... they have done irreparable damage to the right to repair and have contributed more to the e-waste problem with planned obsolescence than any other company in the world. The biggest issue I have with them is that when Apple takes a "brave" stance, it empowers all the other companies to follow in their footsteps and overall leads to a decline in the general market.
The right to repair thing is completely valid and I don’t think there are many if any informed individuals who would disagree with you, but I don’t see the planned obsolescence. iPhones still tend to be supported longer than most Android phones to my knowledge, and it’s only been fairly recently that Android phones have even started to improve their lifecycle support. It wasn’t that long ago that the average Android phone would only get 2-3 years of support after launch. On the computer side, Apple is the only company I am aware of who has an actual timeline for how long software will continue to support the hardware and, on top of that, consistently makes hardware good enough to exceed that timeline. On the other hand if you bought your PC with windows 10, there was a good chance you would not be allowed to upgrade it to windows 11.
The only product in Apple’s lineup that I think planned obsolescence is a problem is their AirPods, which lies entirely in their non-replaceable micro-batteries.
From inside sources, I heard that they worked extremely hard to make AirPods repairable and recyclable. Like, they spent years and burnt out many TPMs before throwing in the towel.
I also disagree with @OBLIVIATOR's assertion that Apple is some e-waste villain. I know through friends that Apple takes recycling extremely seriously and throws real corporate weight into it. It's not just marketing. They have whole teams dedicated to building full recycling supply chains and entire new technologies and equipment to recycle their products. They throw huge corporate resources behind their sustainability efforts, and the executive leadership cares and checks in and holds the teams accountable — so it's not some forgotten department relegated to a back room. It's actually central.
They really do lead the industry in sustainability.
Robert McNeel & Associates are a private, employee-owned software company behind Rhino 3D, one of the most powerful CAD software out there. Its scripting add-on, Grasshopper, is used by all the avant garde architecture to create those alien spaceship-looking building designs you see out there.
They're a quiet, unsexy firm and have been developing and refining Rhino 3D for over 30 years. Their software license is expensive ($1000 a seat) but once you buy it it's yours, and their customer support is great (US-based and speak English).
Quality is out there, but you've got to pay for it.
My wife is a ride or die rhino user, and thanks to educators in her landscape architect faculty who are passionate about quality reliable software. Glad to see it mentioned here.
In the end, the main thing that being a public company actually entails is that you need a robust accounting and reporting system such that you can meet the government-mandated reporting requirements that a public company must satisfy. It's fundamentally about about able to meet transparency goals.
What that lets you do is sell your stock on public stock markets. It doesn't mean you have to let "shareholders" control the company any more than you want to, nor that you are somehow obligated to maximize profit (this is usually confused with fiduciary duty).
There is a matter of correlation there - the usual reason people want to go public is that your stocks being able to be traded by anyone will allow you to raise much more money for capital than a private company would. The fact that it is publicly traded not only means that the pool of investing money is much larger, but also that your equity is very liquid, which makes potential investors less scared about putting money in.
If you don't care, and just want to run your company as a boutique, then going public is a lot of accounting work for not a lot of gain.
So the population of public companies has more companies where the founders have the goal of growing very large, which is what you are likely observing when you say that they have "lower quality services".
That hasn't been true since 1919 when the Dodge v. Ford ruling showed that a corporation must be managed primarily for the profit of its stockholders, not the personal whims or social goals of its founders.
Shareholder primacy is never enforced after that case. There are numerous examples in modern times.
What happened when Zuck decided to spend the GDP of a small country on the metaverse? Nothing. He’s still doing it, buoyed by Meta’s other revenue generating businesses.
Nor is it unique to public companies. Private companies have shareholders as well.
Zucc has a 61% controlling vote share, which is a rare exception to most publicly traded companies.
Sure, but if shareholder primacy were enforced legally, the remaining 39% (as well as all non-voting shareholders) would have grounds to sue. All Zuckerberg’s control gives him is job safety from the board; he is the board.
Public and private companies with CEOs that do not have a controlling vote share suffer from the same pressure; the CEO must appease the shareholder-appointed board to keep their job. The easiest way to make all shareholders happy is to maximize profits; if you believe this is a problem (I do), it’s really a coordination problem akin to the tragedy of the commons.
Worth noting that the duty is to manage in the shareholders interests - that leaves a surprisingly large open door to debate what that actually means: short term profit, long term profit, regulatory risks and fines, reinvestment, asset growth, etc. etc. And then within each of those categories there's even more scope to debate what a reasonable person would expect to achieve those goals: product quality, cost cutting, brand perception, and a million other things.
But yeah, like I said below, the real pressure that most public companies feel is "make share price go up". In practice the incentive structure tends to come out the way you're interpreting it, but I do think the legal nuance is still an interesting one - more than anything because it's a route to realigning those interests a bit if we could get sufficiently large shareholders (pension funds, for example, which are theoretically operating in the interests of millions of normal people) to start making clear that they're willing to sacrifice a certain amount of share price growth for externalities they value more, such as prioritising the environment where doing so is only marginally more expensive than not.
It's also worth noting that Dodge v. Ford was a somewhat extreme case, where there was a reasonable argument that Ford's plans and statements were intended to act against the interest of specific minority shareholders he saw (correctly) as potential competitors, and manipulate the company's dividends and stock price to harm them.
The way I see it once you start taking money by selling shares it becomes way easier to keep doing that instead of increasing sales by making your product or service better.
I think it starts out with good intentions, you need more investments to make the changes to improve your services but then there is always a need for more investment and very quickly the shareholders become the only real customers.
That's not really how it works. You, as in the company, don't really "make money" by selling shares. Because of dilution, the change in net value for the shareholders - which is, in essence, the company, for public and private companies - is 0.
Surely value is created in the process or why would anyone do it?
@stu2b50 is quite right about why issuing shares (or taking on debt, for that matter) can be in the interests of the company - and often that's exactly why it's done. But the other important answer to "why" is that sometimes it's in the interests of the people making the decision, even if that goes against the interests of the company as a whole.
Maybe the money is being raised to invest in the company's long term success. Or maybe it's being raised to boost some short term numbers by spending unsustainably, thus hitting targets and justifying a very large round of executive bonuses. Either can be true, and how easy it is to get away with the latter depends on a whole lot of internal and external factors.
The value is in liquidity - the time value of money. It's the same reason why it can be logical to take on debt, even though in a pure +- calculation, you have less money than when you started when you take a loan (the principle minus interest paid).
It's not pointless, but if you just sell equity the only way for that to be "profitable" is for it to be a ponzi scheme, and overall the company is not gaining value in a ponzi scheme.
The backbone of the company's value is always its actual revenue and potential future revenue.
You could maybe argue that this is also just a function of extreme growth, but going public does tend to re-center compensation for the decision makers in terms of share price, which meaningfully changes the incentive structure compared to an equally large privately held company - there can be a lot more incentive to "metagame" the expected market perception of a move, and particularly to consider that on relatively short timescales, where a privately held company leader will often have more ability to wait for the actual business impacts of a decision to be shown before it's judged.
You're also a lot more likely to be dealing with significant investments from shareholders whose sole interest is increasing share price - a lot of them will be through large funds where the ownership of the company is heavily abstracted away from the investors. The pressures put on the company from that kind of investment can be quite different to those from a smaller number of more targeted shareholders investing in a privately held company, even at similar scale (not to say necessarily better, there are plenty of examples of private equity asset stripping out there, but a privately held company can at least attempt to be selective about taking money only from people whose interests align with those of the founders, in a way that one with significant publicly traded shares can't).
My favorite grocery store of all time, Wegmans. It's been in the top of Fortune's "Best 100 Companies to Work For" list a few times. The employees are always super helpful and their quality and range of products are great. They also have superb gluten-free options (and clear labeling!), which is great because my wife is gluten intolerant.
It's honestly the only place we shop. If we're getting good meat for a special occasion, we'll run to whole foods because their butcher is better. I'd be lying if I said that we didn't take proximity to Wegmans into consideration when we were buying our house... We're 7 minutes away from the closest one.
If grocery stores count, then WinCo all the way! They are not a co-op but they are employee owned, and they have huge stores with major variety. The workers seem to be happier than any grocery chain I’ve ever seen.
That being said the place I shop at the most is a local green grocer, and they are the tops in my book.
Dynalist Inc., the developer of Obsidian
Is it just the software you enjoy or has the developer been doing other good things?
The software and their company's business model.
Saying that Obsidian saved my life is only a slight overstatement. I have ADHD that requires fairy diligent and complex daily management if I am to retain my health and functionality. I'm in the middle of a seriously challenging career transformation, spanning multiple years, that even a neuronormal person would struggle to manage. On top of this, last year I got a new neighbour who is doing their best to drive me off the premises because it would be convenient for them. One way they tried was rogue legal action (which worked on my other neighbour who moved out). Obsidian has been a key factor in all three things going as well as they possibly could go.
Briefly about that last thing:
They were betting on it being enough to threaten me with a lawsuit, because in order to remain confident I didn't do anything wrong, I would have to have an insane amount of pre-recorded data on my daily activities, which normal people do not need nor have. But I have Obsidian and keeping logs is so insanely frictionless that I just started spontaneously doing so a year prior. Mentioning this to their lawyer resulted in him never contacting me again.The reason I've felt confident enough to put my entire life on Obsidian is the way the company is managed. They are against all sorts of enshittification and as part of this, staunchly support user-owned data. There are no proprietary file formats (save for special plugins that need one to function), no mandatory accounts to set up, nothing in the cloud (unless you want to sync something and even then you can use third party options in addition to the native sync). You don't even have to pay anything to start and continue using the fully featured local system. No ads or data-collecting. When you go to the settings, there's an option to turn off AI features and it's turned off by default. That sort of thing.
They have zero corporate bloat - I think they're only 8 employees and a dog - and they have no plans to sell out. In fact, last year a predatory tech firm (Bending Spoons) offered to buy them and they just asked if they may publish the proposition email to gauge user sentiment (obviously sentiment was overwhelmingly negative). The CEO made it clear that everyone who works for them is allowed to throw such emails straight to the bin without even discussing it with others.
They're just a really lovely, special company.
Awesome! That's definitely the kind of company I was hoping to hear more about.
This is off topic to the thread, but:
Tell me more about Obsidian. I'm interested in it from the quick surface look I just took on their website. I'd like to know more about how you use it, how that benefits you, what makes it better than other things you have tried... really anything about it you'd be willing to share. Obviously, no pressure to actually answer me, it's not your job but I like asking passionate people about the ways they are managing their ADHD.
Thanks for asking. How long an explanation do you have time for? :D
I could write a whole book about how I personally use Obsidian, but many of my use cases are quite particular and as such, not necessarily applicable to someone else's situation. Writing in a condensed way is hard though because I don't even have words for some of the functions I have on there. I started building my system as a former Notion user from a standpoint of "I wish Notion could do XYZ".
As soon as I started exploring Obsidian, I realised it can do all/most of that and more. So the first real advantage of Obsidian over other apps, for me, is the endless customisability and extendability. Mind you, to some people this is a disadvantage. It can lead to multiple rabbit holes and obsessions that go beyond improving your life quality and productivity and become more about improving Obsidian. For this reason I actually don't recommend Obsidian for people with ADHD as their first life management app (if you just use it to take notes, it's probably fine). Especially not if the ADHD isn't well managed already - as in, you know how to effectively curb your addictive behaviours and can judge what activities actually serve your life goals vs. what's just a fun pastime to get immersed in, and how to productively divide your time between these.
Before Notion, all I used for life and project management were blank notebooks and blank A4 sheets. No calendar apps, not even Google calendar even though I use Gmail, no to-do apps, nothing outside of the occasional note on the Mac OS Notepad (most of which decayed quickly). My brand of ADHD makes visual clutter intolerable and an app (hell, even a paper calendar that wasn't designed by myself) always has too much clutter. The result is that I have to use excessive amounts of willpower to get myself to actually use the system that's supposed to make my life more frictionless. ADHD means I have too little willpower per day to begin with (I don't generally lack willpower, I just need it for more things than a normal person or something like that). So any system that will consume any amount of it is a system that won't stick.
At the moment I'm gradually transitioning from my first Obsidian system to a new version. The first system comprised of four different vaults (a vault is the entire system of files and folders and a lot of people ever only need one vault). The first one I made was for daily tasks/chores management and monitoring my health protocols and daily structure. Initially I also had a diary type journal on there, and a section for doing CBT exercises, but when the number of tasks started accumulating, the vault started to lag and I separated the latter parts into a second vault. Later I've added a section where I tackle some major life roadblocks that sometimes need special attention.
My third vault was for managing my complex work project as an artist and producer of physical items + collaborations with others + sales and marketing. It also helps now that I'm conceptually transforming the project into something quite different (a process that has taken me years and is still underway). There's also a section that I made a separate vault for due to lagging issues: databases for materials, stock, pricing calculations, sources etc. I think that the sluggishness on the project side is mainly due to my work being very visual - I have tons of fairly high quality images and lots of custom functionality to display them. A less image-driven workflow is not likely to suffer even with a lot of content in a single vault.
As a new thing, I'm developing better time-management / time blocking features for the work side of things. I'm hoping to eventually marry some of the other work related content with this part, once I get it to serve my needs well, but right now it's not feasible because my work vault makes extensive use of the Kanban plugin and that plugin only works well on an old Obsidian version (at least the way I use it: large image embeds on every card). Some other features use the newly released Bases core plugin, so for now, these must be on different vaults and even different machines because they require different Obsidian installations. (How nice that Obsidian offers installation files for every past version and lets me turn auto-updates off!)
Recently I also managed to simplify my tasks vault to the extent that it now works without notable lag even though it has a ton of tasks on there. It also helped that I moved many daily recurring items into the frontmatter instead of auto-creating new tasks for them every day. I could potentially bring back the journal and CBT parts now, but I'm not sure if I want to do that or not. I've found it helpful to have all vaults open simultaneously on separate desktops because shifting from one to the next helps me keep my head straight when I don't see the other stuff anymore. For the same reason, I use a different look/theme/colour on each vault. My mind automatically registers which "hat" I should be wearing and puts me into the right mindset for those tasks.
What makes it different / better? One thing worth mentioning is how frictionless it makes my note taking process. It did take a while to come up with a setup that is ideally frictionless for me and my lifestyle, but now that it's in place, it allows me to note down and manage things I never would have been able to do before. For example, I have a "Log" section on my daily notes on the tasks vault. Whenever a stray thought comes to mind, I press a hotkey, write down the thought into an input field that pops up and hit enter. It goes into the daily log with a timestamp and this happens so fast that my actual thought process (the thing I'm supposed to be working on) doesn't get truncated at all. As soon as I know the thought has been saved somewhere, it stops bothering me, which makes for a massive productivity improvement.
The log notes are so easy and satisfying to make that I started making them whenever I got some sub-task done, every day, just because I wanted to later see how I actually spend my time (knowing this will allow me to then plan my schedules better). This information then came in handy when I suddenly had to prove to a hostile actor that my daily activities are what I say they are and not something they claim they are. A situation I didn't ever think I'd be in, but oh well. There are several other types of notes I'm taking regularly as well, going into different locations, and I could go on and on about their intricacies and how helpful they are.
Another thing that's immensely helpful to me is that I can customise the visual UI to be exactly what I need. I've been able to remove every last bit of annoying colours, shapes, attention-grabbing elements, fonts that are the wrong size or type, etc. I've also added things that are designed to get my attention and exactly the right amount of attention, when I need to pay attention.
For example, my days are divided into five time blocks that live in the sidebar and are literal blocks of colour + a text that lets me know what I'm supposed to be doing. I chose the colours so that they give me positive emotions and also help me orient my mind for whatever that particular block is about. I need to stay aware of time passing so I don't end up just wasting hours on something irrelevant, but I can't use timers, notifications or other things that grab attention by being annoying, and I can't be checking the time from a clock all the time either. Seeing the colour change in the corner of my eye 15 minutes before the start of the next block allows a soft enough transition, instead of killing my vibe 5 x day. If I let my vibe to be killed, I would then have to spend time and focus getting it back, and it probably wouldn't be worth it to do time-blocking at all.
...And that was just two things out of many I could have mentioned. Sorry that this became rambly even when I tried to restrain myself! It's just kind of hard to describe in very few words why and what exactly is so nice about Obsidian.
Oh man! Thank you for the short and concise answer! (I kid, I could read a hundred more paragraphs! I am enamored with your passion!)
I'm stuck now, I think it sounds like a tool that I could benefit from and utilize but also, like you pointed out, could easily consume me wholly, losing any positive effect. I've recently had to come to terms with my "planning paralysis" as a function of my ADHD and, while actively working on it, am also being conscious of how and when it comes into play in my life. I'll have to see if I can dip my toes in and progressively build something that is more robust than my current solution. I really like how customizable Obsidian sounds and it seems like there could be some of the unique solutions I'm looking for.
On the more practical side: (feel under no obligation to answer, you have offered so much of your time already!) it sounds like you are self-hosting all your vaults. Is the the common set up? I don't have a discreet server at the moment and worry about the weight/resource pull on my desktop; is the lag from just "giant database" or from resource intensity? Do the vaults cross-talk, as in, could a task in one vault trigger a task in another vault? As a reasonably technical person, I can manage a lot of tech projects but do you feel this is within the easy reach of high-beginner/low-intermediate technical person?
Ah shit... I think I'm already hyper-focusing!
I'm not sure what you mean by self-hosting, but any Obsidian vault is simply a folder + subfolders on your local machine, unless you want to sync it to another machine (in which case they offer a server and paid service for that - or you could use third party solutions, some of which are free). I have no experience setting up my own server for this but I've seen instructions online on how to do it (I think they were using Syncthing and Tail..something).
My vaults do not talk to each other and I like it that way. I love being able to forget an entire section of my existence when focusing on another.
If you want all of your information to be accessible and searchable/linkable, I recommend sticking to just one vault and simply structuring it so that you can still switch between different areas if you want. One way to do this is with the Workspaces plugin - personally I use Workspaces Plus because it saves Canvas zoom/pan states and I use Canvas a lot. Whenever you've landed on a set of tabs, panes, sidebar elements etc. that works well for you, save that as a workspace and you can return to it quickly even if you drift off to something else. (Oh, and as a new user, definitely experiment dragging tabs around the workspace - it may not be clear at first that you can do that.) I've made this process frictionless by making a clickable button for each workspace with the MetaBind plugin. I have those on a note that I dragged into the sidebar.
I'm not completely sure of all the reasons why my vaults were laggy, but I got the new tasks system running quite smoothly by putting all tasks on one "master" note, under different headers for easy perusal. Before I had one note per task area and I think having to query them all was the main culprit. I have queries on a few other notes that bring up only the tasks that are relevant there. Opening and editing the master note is still laggy because it's over 1700 rows (most of which are a task so at least 1600 tasks in total). But I don't have to touch it often because I add new tasks using the QuickAdd plugin and I rarely have to go edit them afterwards.
The fairly new TaskNotes plugin is also great if you want an easy way to see your tasks in calendar form / a bunch of other views, and edit them directly from there. TaskNotes differs from Tasks in that it makes a separate note for each task. These are just stored inside a folder that you don't have to ever open unless you want. There are benefits to this system but I haven't migrated to it yet because I'm still mainly using an older Obsidian version due to my special plugin needs. Definitely try it out though. It's got a pomodoro functionality and other nice things!
My work vault's lagginess is harder to tackle due to so many large image attachments, but I'm a visual artist so I have way more of them than a normal person would. And it's not unusable, just a little sluggish, after I took out some material and reduced the image sizes. Unless you're in a similar field and if your images are just stuff you download from online (usually lightweight), I wouldn't worry about it.
If you ever run into performance issues and have lots of plugins, there's a plugin as well that lets you turn them off and on methodically to see which one is causing issues. I forgot its name but it's quite popular so should be easy to find.
Thank you so much for the second full answer! I am grateful for your time and energy! This is all super useful and helpful information and gives me a bit of an idea on scope. I don't think I have the spare time/focus to switch in the coming weeks, but it is something I am going to look further into to see if I can switch over and how to plan for it. I'm actively pursuing ADHD treatments and trying to shore up the tools in my toolbox and I think it sounds like Obsidian could be helpful for me as it has been for you.
Again, thank you!
Thank you too for giving me a reason to avoid some cumbersome work :)
My pet peeve regarding Obsidian is that it's developing so fast (especially accounting for third party plugins and how they work together) that the documentation is always lagging behind and many things that can be done with it just aren't mentioned anywhere. I'm happy if my ramblings could offer a glimpse on how one person uses it and give you some ideas. :) Good luck with everything - definitely make a post later if you feel like you need help with something or further ideas.
I forgot to mention two other ways that helped fix the tasks vault lag issue:
I used to have a lot of my daily routines come up as tasks on the daily notes, where I would click them done. It works well for me but that's about 10 items repeating every day. Now that I have that vault on the newest Obsidian version, I chose to put most of them into the notes' frontmatter instead because they're easily viewable with the new Bases core plugin. I can still click them done and they aren't creating a lot of bulk for the tasks query engine to wade through.
My meds are still tasks though, because I take a different strength depending on the day and I have two off days every week. I need the task to explicitly appear into my daily note so that it sticks out rather than just be a part of the frontmatter.
Another thing about the daily notes: the log section receives my log entries I discussed earlier, but also any tasks that were done that day. So there's a query for done tasks on each note. There's also another query for the undone tasks for that day. The daily note is created from a Templater template. One change I made recently was changing the undone tasks query template so that after creating the query on today's note, it removes it from the next newest note (usually that will be yesterday's note). I used (free) ChatGPT to get this done and it worked after a few iterations. I'm assuming that this also makes my vault less laggy when the same query doesn't have to be processed on each past day's note.
rsync.net and purelymail.com are services that do offsite backup storage and email hosting, respectively. That is all. Their marketing strategy is "you need thing? we sell thing. tell us how much thing you need and we will sell you that much thing at a reasonable price." The world needs more companies that do one thing well, aren't trying to expand into an all-encompassing megacorp, and trust you to know better than them what you need.
I've also been happy with LittleMachineShop, who sells home-workshop-sized machine tools and machine tool accessories, and is generally less sketchy and has better QC than the other places one can buy similar tools.
It’s so weird that rsync.net’s extremely plain website immediately makes me trust them more than any storage provider I have ever seen. I guess at some point I began to associate shiny animated sales websites with sketchy business practices. It’s also really refreshing how forward they are about what it is that they are selling. So many of these pitch websites seem like they are trying to hide what they are doing for whatever reason.
(For purelymail.com) I quite like their short and to the point privacy policy but I could not see a warrant canary on their site. Like I know that probably around 95% of personal e-mails originate from US mega-corps which are in the bed with US agencies and even other "privacy-friendly" jurisdictions like Europe have agreements like Nine Eyes but how do you trust an e-mail service that's located inside US that uses AWS with your personal e-mail?
Valid question. I think the answer is that I do more subtle threat modeling than most people do.
My hot take on warrant canaries is that don't actually do anything. If I was running a service where people expected them, I'd provide them because they make people feel better, but there's not much functional difference IMO between "we secretly read your emails" and "we secretly read your emails but people know that we read someone's emails".
In practice, I just treat email as an untrusted channel anyway, because it's not end-to-end encrypted - that is, even if my end is encrypted at rest (e.g. what protonmail does when interacting with other email providers), the other end probably isn't (or effectively isn't), and so I can't rely on the secrecy of it. I just switch to something else for anything sensitive.
Cool, I used to do some IT work for a machine shop decades ago, they can be some very passionate people!
Unless I'm misunderstanding, Canadian Tire is a public company.
Hah, whoops. My bad.
It's nice to see Canadian retail thriving as since NAFTA, it's been less and less in many sectors.
I'll raise you a Calgary Co-op, a grocery chain owned by its members with a successful liquor store, gas bar and loyalty program. While it's been a few years since they switched distributors, their produce used to come almost entirely from Alberta farms. Apparently this just wasn't tenable anymore.
Criterion, the film distributor. They have a surprisingly great streaming service with rotating collections of interesting films, and they release a ton on physical media.
I've had good interactions with https://bearblog.dev/, which, as far as I know, is mostly one guy.
Aside from a very few specific small businesses, I can't say there are necessarily any large businesses I am "happy" to support, just products or services I still find to be reasonable or useful or of a particular quality and if the business hasn't made itself out to be awful in a number of ways, I may recommend their products or services to others.
I find it extremely difficult to determine any I would be enthusiastic about supporting vocally unless they met a high bar of workers' rights, inclusivity, and other standards.
There are crappy companies that still get my business because of an abundance of convenience or affordability or some other reason that I begrudgingly use them
While I understand and even think private vs. public can have a definite impact on how a company operates, I don't think much can be determined from that factor alone (aside from I would be hard-pressed to support any public company enough that I'd consider them worth mentioning to anyone). But plenty of private companies and even small businesses can easily have bad company cultures, be crappy to their workers, make bad products, overcharge for those products, etc
I know it's not perfect, but I've been very pleased with Costco and their stance on a lot of things.
All of the employees I see hired seem to be very happy with their jobs. The company seems to care a lot about pushing affordability and good will over pure profits.
I'm sure they have some skeletons, as all major corporations due, but I see them keeping food prices low and putting apartments above their mega stores. It's nice to see them push the envelope.
I love Costco too, but it is publicly traded
Oh woohps, I somehow glanced over the privately held part. My bad.
Some publicly traded companies are certainly better than others but I was hoping to find more privately owned companies.
If someone can provide a clothing company they trust I would appreciate it, It's getting impossible to find clothes that won't disintegrate after the first wash, or are a rip-off without providing better quality than the average product simply because you pay the brand.
I'm willing to pay a slight premium for something that lasts, buying fashion products always strains and disappoints me.
Four years or so ago I got so frustrated looking at the same cheap footwear on amazon I went on a hunt to find a decent manufacturer. Everything I could find in the US was overpriced garbage so I looked abroad and discovered that Leon Mexico has a huge leather industry. Found a local shoe retailer there and ordered directly from them. They shipped quickly and the shoes have been great.
I'm still kicking myself for not remembering the name of the retailer but I'd love to hear of more places like that.Finally found the site again! https://www.flexi.com.mx/
It’s only for socks, but Darn Tough socks are worth every penny. If you aren’t aware, they are guaranteed for life. They are fantastic socks, so it will take you a long time to wear through them, but when you do (nothing lasts forever), you fill out a short form online, mail them back, and get a store credit to use on their website for a new pair. Fantastic product, fantastic company. I couldn’t tell how their ownership works, but I think they are privately owned.
I'm not sure what's available in your country/region, or whether this is specifically a private company (Google suggests it is, but I'm not sure how to verify that). That said, I've been really happy with everything I've bought from UNIQLO, both here in Spain and directly from Japan.
I agree with UNIQLO, it has been my go-to store, combined with MUJI for household items, looks like the Japanese are the only ones who still care to give customers what they pay.
A while ago I saw a video comparing multiple fast fashion brands and how they do business. It's kind of interesting because they said that UNIQLO was basically the only company who operates vertically. Most fashion companies will design their products and then contract foreign manufacturers to make them for them, or in the case of more modern iterations like Shein and Temu, they let manufacturers sell semi-directly via their marketplace. UNIQLO, on the other hand, prefers to own the production process, which allows them to better maintain a standard of quality.
I've always wanted to try their clothes, but because they are a Japanese company and their sizes are small, I haven't even bothered to step foot into any of their stores.
I've gone in to hiking clothing, its practical and tends to be at least decent quality (although you still have to be careful about cheap brands and luxury/fashion margins). Patagonia has a lot of good core principles and make good clothing, and they sell used clothing on their website. Cotopaxi is also good quality, although I don't know about their principles (and their used clothing website seems to have gotten worse). REI is a great store and has their own house brand that makes really practical clothing for a great price.
Also UNIQLO, I know everything there is going to be a good baseline of value for the price.
Apple is publicly traded, this topic is looking for privately owned companies.
Off topic but mine too and me too! :)
I'm aware that Elon Musk is a controversial figure, but what SpaceX has achieved is remarkable. Prior to the Falcon 9, the space industry was dominated by large, very expensive rockets procured through massive public contracts. The rise of reusable, high-cadence rockets has made space far more accessible, and it appears that much of the profits are being reinvested in building even larger, more reusable rockets (Starship).
But what has really been the money spinner for SpaceX is Starlink, which has completely changed internet connectivity and communications for multiple industries. Being able to be out in the middle of nowhere (at sea and remote land) and be able to get fast internet is astounding. I'll be watching out to see if this improves/cheapens internet connectivity in poorer or more remote communities.
I know somebody who was able to get hooked up to Starlink when it first launched. He is disabled and lives on a native american reservation that was never able to get its own proper highspeed lines. It's certainly made a lot more things possible for him.
I do worry given the nature of the tech that service quality will degrade the more people who hook up to it. The company might also go public this year and that could start to effect the price and quality before too long.