One of the most fascinating blog posts I have come across. It's well-written and makes some excellent points. I feel it aligns well with the philosophy behind Tildes.
One of the most fascinating blog posts I have come across. It's well-written and makes some excellent points. I feel it aligns well with the philosophy behind Tildes.
Great post. Even though this isn't the focus of the post, I can't help buy think of the different interactions I see on old-style forums versus sites like reddit. I wonder if there's more to this...
Great post. Even though this isn't the focus of the post, I can't help buy think of the different interactions I see on old-style forums versus sites like reddit. I wonder if there's more to this than just profit vs nonprofit.
They become familiar faces, and undoubtedly make their mark on the shared culture.
versus
Everyone stays strangers, and a sort of stranger-culture emerges where guards are up by default because there are never any familiar faces.
Agreed. The enshitification process happens with all money-making outfits really, not just online forums. Product gets popular, reaches market saturation or hits some other profit ceiling, company...
Agreed. The enshitification process happens with all money-making outfits really, not just online forums.
Product gets popular, reaches market saturation or hits some other profit ceiling, company begins reducing quality of product either to cut costs or increase reach by single-digit percentage points.
Once all the blood has been squeezed from the stone, company either closes up shop and execs leave with golden parachutes, or company turns into a barely-functioning, run-by-5-interns-in-a-basement shell of what it once was and the execs leave with golden parachutes.
I am a long time forum user, but a new user to Tildes specifically. For that reason, I want to be careful about offering suggestions to more senior tildes users. That said, another one of my takeaways from this article is that we should all be careful about where we send our Tildes invites. I plan to only share mine with users who have a history of good-faith participation on another forum or social platform.
I have begun to think about it as asking or answering the question, "Why does this company exist?" I think in the past, there were many companies for whom the answer was "to make something useful...
I have begun to think about it as asking or answering the question, "Why does this company exist?" I think in the past, there were many companies for whom the answer was "to make something useful that makes people's lives better". But, increasingly, it seems like the mainstream answer is "to make money". And when that is the answer, the end will never be good because the ways to make the most money are always exploitative: lower wages, lay people off, reduce production costs, "do more with less". VCs and investors only care about the bottom line, and leaving any potential profit on the table is unacceptable.
I just left a startup, and I've been thinking a lot about the next steps. One of the ideas is that I have been kicking around is that there must be way to say "we make a thing, and do it well, and the thing makes enough money".
This idea is relatively unformed at this point, but I think transparency is a big part of it. If you look at something like tildes, you could identify operating costs, living wage salary and benefits for staff, clear margins for development of new features, etc, then say, "to do all that, we need to make X, which means we charge you Y".
The downsides to this, of course, are getting consensus on what "enough" is and competing in a marketplace that doesn't value transparency and "enough". I am sure there are either problems I haven't thought of.
Edit: I posted this and immediately saw a post further down from @NotAVanillaTwilight about non-profits and realized I have just been (badly) reinventing that wheel.
I appreciated your comment, and I think it was more than a simple rehashing. In particular, I'm interested in the soul searching you're doing about your career. In another comment I mentioned the...
I appreciated your comment, and I think it was more than a simple rehashing.
In particular, I'm interested in the soul searching you're doing about your career. In another comment I mentioned the problem with publicly traded companies, which is the inherent requirement for unsustainable infinite growth. So my one piece of advice would probably be not to work for a company with a stock ticker. Private companies just have to keep up with inflation.
In some ways, Apple is, or at least has been, that company. And that philosophy made them extremely wealthy. It almost was their demise, too. Because execution stank in the 90s, Apple almost...
In some ways, Apple is, or at least has been, that company. And that philosophy made them extremely wealthy.
It almost was their demise, too. Because execution stank in the 90s, Apple almost doomed themselves by being to focused on their own thing. But the iMac, iPod and IPhone were all the result of a product first (as opposed to profit first) philosophy. (Sometimes product > user and it makes me mad, bit overall for Apple product=user)
I don't think Apple is product first anymore. There's a lot of evidence that they are money > product > user. Otherwise they wouldn't have removed the headphone jack from the iPad, for example....
I don't think Apple is product first anymore. There's a lot of evidence that they are money > product > user. Otherwise they wouldn't have removed the headphone jack from the iPad, for example. There's no valid reason to remove the headphone jack from that device. Their typical excuse for wanting smaller/thinner/waterproof is nonsense for a tablet. They just want to sell more wireless headphones.
This is a sore point for me, because I replaced an older iPad last year, only to discover after I bought it that to plug in headphones I need a USB-C adaptor, and that it also stuck out the bottom which means I couldn't hold the tablet in portrait mode while using the headphones.
There are other ways they are anti-product, such as gluing batteries into the devices so that you can't replace them on your own. Also how they have now wired RAM into the CPU so you can never upgrade your laptop. Also their general anti-self repair stance. Yes, I know we can argue that they may have excuses for doing these things, but they are all choices that they made to make more long term money and have worse products.
This is exactly what the Green brothers do with Complexly and all of their associated companies. Things like the Awesome Coffee Club make enough money to sustain their operation and then 100% of...
This is exactly what the Green brothers do with Complexly and all of their associated companies. Things like the Awesome Coffee Club make enough money to sustain their operation and then 100% of the rest goes to Partners In Health. Hank Green's entire life is focused around answering the question "what awesome or wacky things can we do that will make money we can give away?" Complexly itself is a little different because its service (free, high-quality, easy-to-access online education) is its focus, rather than donations to charity, but it's still about the service, not the profit.
Seriously, if you want models for good rich people, look at them. No one is perfect, but compared to the average tech CEO/billionaire/VC bro/etc, the Green brothers might as well be.
Subreddits were the most successful attempt to square the circle between continual growth and maintaining community. The big subs became cesspools of unrestrained growth, but smaller stable...
Subreddits were the most successful attempt to square the circle between continual growth and maintaining community. The big subs became cesspools of unrestrained growth, but smaller stable communities were able to develop in the backwaters of reddit.
What you're touching on is humanity versus industry and capitalism. Capitalism is a linear A leads to B process. It is a function and a process and lacks all humanity. Capitalism demands you take...
What you're touching on is humanity versus industry and capitalism. Capitalism is a linear A leads to B process. It is a function and a process and lacks all humanity. Capitalism demands you take the path of least resistance and it demands efficiency to maximize the capital chained through industry. It's greed in function form.
The industrial revolution had a nasty side effect of eroding culture, society, hierarchies, tradition, community, elders, and most of what makes humans special. It reduced us to tools to help someone else get their capital. The two are oil and water.
Any time you see a place where humanity can gather to do human things, or even if it's just an individual, capitalism will come along and kill it.
The optimism is humanity's spirit has endured and is shown to be unbreakable. The pessimism is we can't put capitalism back in the box and regain what we lost.
I would not say that capitalism (or anything really) is a linear process - there's a collective forgetting process where we forget the twists and turns which have brought us to where we are today...
I would not say that capitalism (or anything really) is a linear process - there's a collective forgetting process where we forget the twists and turns which have brought us to where we are today and instead imagine this line of progress (suggesting that the progression was also inevitable). Thomas Kuhn's very interesting The Structure of Scientific Revolutions details this mechanism at length.
Completely tangentially it irks me that when considering the history of science people often look down on previous scientists who made mistakes. For example Kekulé's model of Benzene was (it is true) not correct, but it was also a very reasonable hypothesis given the data he had available to him at the time. The danger, of course, is that we then tend to think that we, today, are "beyond" the same kind of mistakes that the fools of the past made (for example thinking that handwashing didn't help, bleeding patients made sense, etc) when we are just making far bigger ones today – e.g. PFAS, global warming, etc. It does not do well to dwell on the specific facts past scientists got wrong, and forget to analyse the systems they applied and contexts in which they lived which led them to make these discoveries. If we do that, then we can see how we can improve our current models.
I regard the loss of half of those to be essential ingredients to human progress. The other half, I am in agreement that we are worse off without them. Without community, there can be no elders to...
The industrial revolution had a nasty side effect of eroding culture, society, hierarchies, tradition, community, elders, and most of what makes humans special.
I regard the loss of half of those to be essential ingredients to human progress. The other half, I am in agreement that we are worse off without them. Without community, there can be no elders to share their wisdom—or at least share their follies.
Accepting a hierarchy because culture+tradition says it's your place in life is defeatist. Take what you can, regardless of whether it was "deserved" or if it was your place in society.
Hierarchies are and have been abused, but knowing how to be human because someone older than you shared their experience is something we desperately need and have lost. Boys don't know what being...
Hierarchies are and have been abused, but knowing how to be human because someone older than you shared their experience is something we desperately need and have lost.
Boys don't know what being a boy or a man means biologically speaking, they don't know how to deal with their hormones and anger and other complex issues because there's no mentors for that anymore.
There's no community leader that knows what their people struggle with and knows local solutions that apply to them but maybe not other communities because everything is industrialized.
I think non-proffit is the way to go, honestly. Otherwise we’d just have another Reddit and I don’t want another Reddit.
One of the most fascinating blog posts I have come across. It's well-written and makes some excellent points. I feel it aligns well with the philosophy behind Tildes.
Great post. Even though this isn't the focus of the post, I can't help buy think of the different interactions I see on old-style forums versus sites like reddit. I wonder if there's more to this than just profit vs nonprofit.
versus
Agreed. The enshitification process happens with all money-making outfits really, not just online forums.
Product gets popular, reaches market saturation or hits some other profit ceiling, company begins reducing quality of product either to cut costs or increase reach by single-digit percentage points.
Once all the blood has been squeezed from the stone, company either closes up shop and execs leave with golden parachutes, or company turns into a barely-functioning, run-by-5-interns-in-a-basement shell of what it once was and the execs leave with golden parachutes.
I am a long time forum user, but a new user to Tildes specifically. For that reason, I want to be careful about offering suggestions to more senior tildes users. That said, another one of my takeaways from this article is that we should all be careful about where we send our Tildes invites. I plan to only share mine with users who have a history of good-faith participation on another forum or social platform.
I have begun to think about it as asking or answering the question, "Why does this company exist?" I think in the past, there were many companies for whom the answer was "to make something useful that makes people's lives better". But, increasingly, it seems like the mainstream answer is "to make money". And when that is the answer, the end will never be good because the ways to make the most money are always exploitative: lower wages, lay people off, reduce production costs, "do more with less". VCs and investors only care about the bottom line, and leaving any potential profit on the table is unacceptable.
I just left a startup, and I've been thinking a lot about the next steps. One of the ideas is that I have been kicking around is that there must be way to say "we make a thing, and do it well, and the thing makes enough money".
This idea is relatively unformed at this point, but I think transparency is a big part of it. If you look at something like tildes, you could identify operating costs, living wage salary and benefits for staff, clear margins for development of new features, etc, then say, "to do all that, we need to make X, which means we charge you Y".
The downsides to this, of course, are getting consensus on what "enough" is and competing in a marketplace that doesn't value transparency and "enough". I am sure there are either problems I haven't thought of.
Edit: I posted this and immediately saw a post further down from @NotAVanillaTwilight about non-profits and realized I have just been (badly) reinventing that wheel.
I appreciated your comment, and I think it was more than a simple rehashing.
In particular, I'm interested in the soul searching you're doing about your career. In another comment I mentioned the problem with publicly traded companies, which is the inherent requirement for unsustainable infinite growth. So my one piece of advice would probably be not to work for a company with a stock ticker. Private companies just have to keep up with inflation.
In some ways, Apple is, or at least has been, that company. And that philosophy made them extremely wealthy.
It almost was their demise, too. Because execution stank in the 90s, Apple almost doomed themselves by being to focused on their own thing. But the iMac, iPod and IPhone were all the result of a product first (as opposed to profit first) philosophy. (Sometimes product > user and it makes me mad, bit overall for Apple product=user)
I don't think Apple is product first anymore. There's a lot of evidence that they are money > product > user. Otherwise they wouldn't have removed the headphone jack from the iPad, for example. There's no valid reason to remove the headphone jack from that device. Their typical excuse for wanting smaller/thinner/waterproof is nonsense for a tablet. They just want to sell more wireless headphones.
This is a sore point for me, because I replaced an older iPad last year, only to discover after I bought it that to plug in headphones I need a USB-C adaptor, and that it also stuck out the bottom which means I couldn't hold the tablet in portrait mode while using the headphones.
There are other ways they are anti-product, such as gluing batteries into the devices so that you can't replace them on your own. Also how they have now wired RAM into the CPU so you can never upgrade your laptop. Also their general anti-self repair stance. Yes, I know we can argue that they may have excuses for doing these things, but they are all choices that they made to make more long term money and have worse products.
This is exactly what the Green brothers do with Complexly and all of their associated companies. Things like the Awesome Coffee Club make enough money to sustain their operation and then 100% of the rest goes to Partners In Health. Hank Green's entire life is focused around answering the question "what awesome or wacky things can we do that will make money we can give away?" Complexly itself is a little different because its service (free, high-quality, easy-to-access online education) is its focus, rather than donations to charity, but it's still about the service, not the profit.
Seriously, if you want models for good rich people, look at them. No one is perfect, but compared to the average tech CEO/billionaire/VC bro/etc, the Green brothers might as well be.
Sorry if I made you feel bad. That wasn’t my intent. :(
Not at all. I got significant insight from your comment. I am thinking about the possibility of a tech non-profit myself.
Oh. That’s great! Congrats. Good luck.
Subreddits were the most successful attempt to square the circle between continual growth and maintaining community. The big subs became cesspools of unrestrained growth, but smaller stable communities were able to develop in the backwaters of reddit.
What you're touching on is humanity versus industry and capitalism. Capitalism is a linear A leads to B process. It is a function and a process and lacks all humanity. Capitalism demands you take the path of least resistance and it demands efficiency to maximize the capital chained through industry. It's greed in function form.
The industrial revolution had a nasty side effect of eroding culture, society, hierarchies, tradition, community, elders, and most of what makes humans special. It reduced us to tools to help someone else get their capital. The two are oil and water.
Any time you see a place where humanity can gather to do human things, or even if it's just an individual, capitalism will come along and kill it.
The optimism is humanity's spirit has endured and is shown to be unbreakable. The pessimism is we can't put capitalism back in the box and regain what we lost.
I would not say that capitalism (or anything really) is a linear process - there's a collective forgetting process where we forget the twists and turns which have brought us to where we are today and instead imagine this line of progress (suggesting that the progression was also inevitable). Thomas Kuhn's very interesting The Structure of Scientific Revolutions details this mechanism at length.
Completely tangentially it irks me that when considering the history of science people often look down on previous scientists who made mistakes. For example Kekulé's model of Benzene was (it is true) not correct, but it was also a very reasonable hypothesis given the data he had available to him at the time. The danger, of course, is that we then tend to think that we, today, are "beyond" the same kind of mistakes that the fools of the past made (for example thinking that handwashing didn't help, bleeding patients made sense, etc) when we are just making far bigger ones today – e.g. PFAS, global warming, etc. It does not do well to dwell on the specific facts past scientists got wrong, and forget to analyse the systems they applied and contexts in which they lived which led them to make these discoveries. If we do that, then we can see how we can improve our current models.
I regard the loss of half of those to be essential ingredients to human progress. The other half, I am in agreement that we are worse off without them. Without community, there can be no elders to share their wisdom—or at least share their follies.
Accepting a hierarchy because culture+tradition says it's your place in life is defeatist. Take what you can, regardless of whether it was "deserved" or if it was your place in society.
Hierarchies are and have been abused, but knowing how to be human because someone older than you shared their experience is something we desperately need and have lost.
Boys don't know what being a boy or a man means biologically speaking, they don't know how to deal with their hormones and anger and other complex issues because there's no mentors for that anymore.
There's no community leader that knows what their people struggle with and knows local solutions that apply to them but maybe not other communities because everything is industrialized.