> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.
I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse.
That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan."
I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. No one cares about them. It's all about fattening the company, and making it look good. When we do that, we'll feed it nothing but junk food, in an effort to make it as fat as possible, as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought as to long-term viability.
I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. It's still possible to make a decent living, but maybe not at the insane rates we see.
"The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality. Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up as common.
Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you. It's a very weird dynamic.
It helps to formally understand who is who. Every company has staff, customers, suppliers and product.
If you go the VC route then the VC is the customer. Since any good business is focused on customer satisfaction, a VC funded business is focused on VC satisfaction.
VCs want an exit. Which necessarily means switching funding model. The only switch that has worked so far is advertising. Advertising requires attention.
Of course a business can succeed with say SaaS subscriptions instead of advertising. This works well for B2B, but less so for B2C. Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B).
The pattern is now well understood, and well demonstrated. If your business is B2C then figure out the funding model. If you can't do that, if you can't do it without VC money, then your path is predestined.
That's what you get when an expert financial trader makes a company. He wanted billions from the start ... so how to do it? There's only one way, really: a pyramid scheme. But an atypical one: get lots of sales, lots of revenue and change any profit into capital. This is quite a common plan in Western Europe, and that's why it doesn't work there.
Why would you do that? Well companies are taxed on profit. And the money you pay to investors ... is also paid out of the profit. No profit -> all the money stays in the company, under the control of management, ready to be deployed on yachts and castles for the CEO. Governments get nothing. Investors get nothing.
Jeff Bezos (and very early investors) get everything. If they get desperate there is a buyback (no doubt matched by a greater stock package for the top of the company).
This is a pyramid scheme because the whole company only works because it only makes extremely minimal profit. If it starts demanding profit it will be eaten alive by competition in no time at all. Money has to be invested in, flows to the top, and is taken out at the top. No doubt Bezos was utterly baffled by the success of it and therefore isn't yet out, but ...
> If it starts demanding profit it will be eaten alive by competition in no time at all.
At least until it becomes too big to fail and can build anticompetitive "moats" around itself to increase the amount of profit it can take.
For example, in the case of Amazon, they aren't just a retailer, they're a logistics and shipping company, too. And all of those are separate, itemized services that suppliers pay for, which increases revenue in a very opaque and difficult to understand way. On the customer's end that means higher prices and worse selection.
Any competitor to Amazon doesn't just have to get the same products for cheaper, they also have to build their own shipping company that can get products to people with <48hr turnaround. This provides a lot of room for Amazon to take a cut.
That being said, when you start building a giant business empire the direct profits matter less than the amount of control over the economy you get. In other words, you have the power to tax and subsidy, just like a government does. Amazon maintained minimal profit by deliberately subsidizing new business ventures until they could get big enough to become extractive on their own.
At no point does the business flip a switch and go from "deliberately burning money to avoid carrying a profit" to "extracting so much profit they get eaten by nimbler competition". They instead are always burning money, and always extracting, moving money to where they see fit.
If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.
Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.
Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.
Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).
Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).
A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality?
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.
They are betting on whether richer people will bet on the same things so they can cash out. Repeat, all the way up.
The entire economy is to some degree a casino betting on itself. I think this is always true to an extent but the casino nature becomes much more dominant the more unbalanced things become.
I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat
You must not know many rich people if you think addiction is not an issue for the wealthy. The drugs of choice are less immediately destructive, but cocaine, pills, MDMA and ketamine are all wildly abused by the 1%.
All humans are susceptible to addictions and addictive behavior, but the 1% that you mention are mostly shielded from their negative effects. It's far less of an issue for them, and it's not even just about choosing the less destructive drugs. If we talk about just drug addictions, their wealth ensures that:
1. They always have a reliable supply of their preferred drug. No matter how much they need, many of them will be able to afford it pretty much indefinitely. They can just live with the addiction.
2. They have first-class healthcare to mitigate the addiction and lessen its side effects.
3. They have the power to never run into any legal trouble over it. How often do 1%s get convicted on drug possession? This often applies even to the harshest regimes.
So, referring to what the other commenter said, the wealth inequality also affects addicts unequally. The rich, excluding the most extreme exceptions, are immune to the downward spirals of addictions and many of their consequences. The poor addicts become increasingly desperate as their drug habit consumes most of their income and savings. The poorest turn to the cheapest, most dangerous street drugs. Many get little to no medical help. Many are charged with drug-related crimes, ensuring their criminality keeps them down for the rest of their lives. This varies by country, but the patterns are all similar.
There's always going to be an underlying layer of people who tend to gravitate towards addictions, rich and poor - the real question is if more and more people are turning to them as they get desperate, who wouldn't otherwise have.
Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.
Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering
the article is about digital addictions, and not gambling or drugs.
The point of saying it's complicated isn't to dismiss the problem, but to invite a deeper understanding of the problem itself so as to be better equiped to help solve the underlying issue, rather than show up, guns blazing, and then not actually fix anything.
In the short run if you can get acquired then the long run fundamentals don't matter. They just become noise in some larger company's financial statements.
> A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all in on "AI".
Capitalism as we know it so far only reacts after a crash happens because of the fear of crashing the economy with any corrective action. My very personal opinion is this is more psychological than scientific.
No, the reason is because these "crashes" are very small so on average you lose more trying to avoid them than just staying invested. The emotional part is trying to avoid them, the rational part isn't.
When you really think about it, this also applies to very many publicly traded companies. Tech especially, always searching to present next growth area. And then often shortly abandoning it or wasting massive resources on it...
We make fun of the state run businesses of old communist regimes, how wasteful they were, how mismanaged they were, how they produced stuff nobody wanted and so on. I'm increasingly getting a similar feeling for VC fueled tech. It's all smoke and mirrors of hype (was blockchain or web3.0 yesterday, AI and quantum today). There is so much wasted money, especially after quantitative easing and negative interest rates of the past decade.
Publicly traded is no better. Lets not forget whole Meta and Metaverse and VR "investment". Google basically launching entire physical products and then killing them and refunding everyone (Stadia)...
One might question would we as society be better off if that money was spend on more efficient factories or say nuclear powerplants?
The difference is that VC fueled startups is a very small part of the economy while communist regimes are the entire economy.
Imagine if every company was as wasteful as VC fueled startups and life would be hell, imagine going to the new smart grocery store where prices changes by the minute and now you have surge pricing since many wanted to buy toilet paper this minute...
They may be a small part of the economy as measured in imaginary numbers being shifted around but still have a significant negative effect on our lives that cannot be easily escaped. This is even more true when you also count publicly traded companies which have similar incentives to sell out their "customers" in order to benefit the real customers and are often just the final form of VC funded startups.
You force them to pay for the negative externalities they cause so that their profit incentives are not as misaligned with what is good for the rest of the world. This includes making companies pay for pollution but also for much more abstract damages like the reduced consumer choice from monopolies.
To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is long before Milton Friedman began advocating that corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is itself a long strange story.
The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common shareholders get from the corporation only what is their privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter. There are now, and have been in the past, many different kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example, some big corporations today have many common shareholders who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting them various interests in the corporation, is that the common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation, as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by other persons, and owns itself.
It’s incredible how many people don’t understand this. Google is an obvious example that has multiple classes of stock and only some are voting shares.
There is the “shareholder lawsuit” but that really is about enforcing a company’s stated goals to its shareholders, which can and often are things other than “try to make the stock price go up as much as possible”.
I am repeatedly entertained by the phenomenon of someone who reads a case, bothers to remember it, thinks it's important, describes it, but does not provide a citation.
Friedman deeply misunderstands agency law. Saying he got the lawyers behind him is misleading, because there are any corporate fiduciary duties owed by directors or officers to the shareholder other than 1) act informed 2) do not usurp corporate opportunity.
It's not legally required in the state of Delaware (or Michigan where Dodge v Ford occured) to _maximize_ shareholder value.
It's that if you're going to make a decision that affects 1/3 of the companies value you need to actually claim it's in the shareholders interest that you do so.
I don't think maximization of shareholder value is really the interesting part, it's the mandate that they must be prioritized ahead of employees and customers.
> It's that if you're going to make a decision that affects 1/3 of the companies value you need to actually claim it's in the shareholders interest that you do so.
I'm not really sure where the 1/3rd ratio came from. Can you explain? To my layman's ear, "value" and "shareholder value" are the exact same thing.
> I don't think maximization of shareholder value is really the interesting part, it's the mandate that they must be prioritized ahead of employees and customers.
The problem is that Ford didn't try to claim that the factory was in the shareholder's best interest.
> I'm not really sure where the 1/3rd ratio came from. Can you explain? To my layman's ear, "value" and "shareholder value" are the exact same thing.
Nothing special about 1/3. It's the value of the dividend (19 M) / value of Ford (60 M). If you're going to spend 1/3 of the company on something you better at least claim it's in the company / shareholder's best interest.
---
To quote the wikipedia article
> Under some interpretations, the case also affirmed that the business judgment rule that directors may exercise is expansive, leaving Ford and other businesses a wide latitude about how to run the company, if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
And then to emphasis: "if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole."
Genuine question because I think I might be wrong on this one, or maybe misunderstanding what you're saying - aren't there cases of shareholders suing CEOs for not acting in shareholders interest and winning? If there was no legal obligation to act on behalf of shareholders how could they win those cases?
My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being sued if they actually have the money to make it worth suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse affect on their deal flow
Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand for something real but very complex.
I think Matt Levine coined this phrase: "everything is securities fraud."
Activist investors will sue for anything alleging that executives broke securities law by doing anything that harmed their portfolio. It doesn't mean they win the cases, or that anyone is guilty.
There's also something worth noting that even if there isn't a legal obligation for executives to act on their shareholders interests, they have a really strong incentive when their compensation is mostly stock grants and the shareholders can fire them.
> The Court declared that, in certain limited circumstances indicating that the "sale" or "break-up" of the company is inevitable, the fiduciary obligation of the directors of a target corporation are narrowed significantly, the singular responsibility of the board being to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available.
Seems to imply that under normal operation (i.e. no inevitable break-up) the fiduciary obligations are quite different though?
Yes, under normal circumstances, the "business judgment rule" applies which is much more favorable to boards. Satisfying it requires only that directors:
- act in good faith;
- act in the best interests of the corporation;
- act on an informed basis;
- not be wasteful;
- not involve self-interest (duty of loyalty concept plays a role here).
If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea.
That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
Edit: To say: I voted with my feet and moved to a place which better aligns with my values. From a "common good" society to a "freedom" society.
I'm not sure this is true. My analysis shows that 75% of economic transitions are completed without violent revolt.
Just a quick glance at the 44 historic economic transitions in my dataset, most of them aren't well known. The most likely reason why we think economic revolutions are associated with violent revolt is due to selection bias - violent revolts are more memorable, take up a larger section of history books, etc.
Happy to take at look at your dataset and compare notes.
Many EU countries are pretty nice places to live, and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen. All it took was democracy, a population willing to stand for its rights, and an elite which understood that building a welfare state is preferable outcome over having a violent Communist/Fascist revolution.
A capitalist system with right amount of social democracy to prevent worst concentration of wealth is the best model there is, at least for the well-being of its citizen and survival of its democracy.
"Stand for it's rights" is just weasel words for "Was willing to use violence in order to obtain their rights"
Even if they never actually had to become violent, violence or the credible threat of violence is the only thing that has ever in history convinced "The Elites" to change things
There was no such revolt in the country where I live, and in many others. Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system, with democracy you can change the economic system without a revolution.
> Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system
I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
> It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
It did create democracy, the French Republic, Napoleon did end that though but its much easier to reinstate democracy later than to create it from scratch.
> I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
Revolutions to loot the rich happened a lot throughout history, but here the explicit goal was to end monarchy and create democracy not just looting the rich, that is a big difference.
I think the majority of European countries had a violent revolution. And the German invasion of many neighboring nations had the same characteristics, they were welcomed with their new world order by the populace in many places.
The war in general ushered in new economic systems.
After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
There's no general way to model, only empirical evidence. Unless I'm supposed to enter the mind and soul of people and see their motives and reasoning.
Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population.
>To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population
It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism.
Common good happens at the grass roots level and then spreads by consensus. Doesnt mean it will happen on a large scale, esp if there are larger forces at work.
It seems like this is a population size problem to me. Or at least a concentration of large populations in a small area (Cities). Maybe the trick is to spread out the population a bit more and prevent areas from becoming over populated somehow.
I don't have the data in front of me right now, but there are some sources that say when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
Thus this creates social circles that try to gain power for powers sake and do not contribute to society.
> when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
You may be interested in this essay from the feminist movement in the 60s: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm. It describes how the lack of structure or process forces the group to be run primarily by social dynamics like friendship, charm and influence.
There are lots of effects that happen as groups scale. But this capture of consensus-based and flat groups by ego-centric charismatic members happens in even tiny groups.
That's why successful flat groups (e.g. parliaments) have structure (e.g. Robert's rules) and make decisions by majority vote rather than consensus.
Yeah I can see some truth in this. Structure and processes help us deal with this problem. And my experience has been that structures and process get corrupted, kind of like what has happens in or political systems over the years.
IMHO, it seems like it easier to deal with ego when the groups are smaller. When they get too large, we tend to use bureaucracies to manage decision making logistics. Bureaucracies make it easier for people that want power over others to hide.
> After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
What do you mean by exterminate large swatches of the population in Scandinavia? Yes the way the Sumi have (and to a degree still are) been treated is atrocious, but I'd argue that if anything this is not a feature of creating a "common good" society. I would argue that strongly capitalistic/mercetalistic societies have a horrible track record of treating (and still treat) indigenous populations.
They're called Sami, and I don't think they've been treated much worse than any other ethnicity in Nordic countries.
What I'm referring to are the eugenics programs in Sweden, where unfit people were sterilized and/or had their children taken from them. These kind of programs were also present in North America, for what it's worth. The complete extent of these programs will probably forever be unknown, in all countries. Scandinavian countries are probably the countries who are most open about this, just like with suicide reporting.
As for Finland, they had a communist revolution and a very brutal civil war about the same time as the Russians. So their "common good" society was also born from a bloodbath, although the communists lost the war.
Norway is probably an exception. They're building a "common good" society on oil fortunes, just like the Gulf states have no problem with giving generous welfare for all of their citizens.
Switzerland is not a good place for working moms. It is a very conservative country, for example working moms are systematically discriminated. The society, police, insurance, and banks enforce a conformity to a conservative, male-dominated society.
I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings.
At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment in time.
Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
> We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Those aren't very productive, our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status. Older systems people destroyed value for others in that chase, creating wars or other miseries, we have much less of that today.
I'd much rather have another billionaire than another authoritarian warmongering dictator.
> our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status
I don't think most of the people who have extremely high status are doing anything remotely close to producing value
They just own capital which they use to pay other people to produce value, which they then take credit for, which boosts their status
So it would seem that we're pretty divorced from the idea of "produce value -> get status" these days, if you can just pay people to produce value for you instead
Billionaires are the warlords of the 21st century. The only difference is that we've switched the map. We don't compete on the land, we compete on economic territory. But the results are the same - they fill the same role.
Expansionism, cult of followers, dispensing boons, and absolute control over their territory? check. The only reason we don't recognize them as warlords is because they don't wave scimitars and wear turbans. Neolibrral warlords wear Patagonia vests and beige slacks.
We're terrible at mistaking asthetics for function. Fortresses have been replaced by platforms; trade routes replaced by data sharing agreements. Armies have been ursurped by legal teams and lobbyists. We barely escaped feudalism and it's not clear we're out of the orbit of neo feudalism.
If we're able to be honest with ourselves, we need to learn that asthetics and function are different things. Just because they look different doesn't mean they don't fulfill the same function.
If it's zero sum you can design a system where everyone gets three sane amount. That's what strict monogamy does for mating, and you can easily imagine some "everyone is equal" communism-like system.
In practice that doesn't work, and the most successful "common good" systems instead ensure the disparity is limited and access is as equal as possible (e.g. not everyone can be wealthy, but the wealthy are not too rich and anyone had a chance to become rich instead of needing rich parents; or everyone can only have one married partner at a time instead of people who can afford it amassing big harems and not leaving any partners for the rest; or anyone can become famous, and famous people pushing their kids into fame is looked down on)
Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources.
At one extreme you get theories like communism or socialism that treat humans as disposable cattle to be murdered or starved when they stand in the way of whatever the party leaders decide is the common good.
The common good is something that has to be worked out deliberatively and is more like taking the resultant of a huge number of force vectors than it is like mass producing units of the same good for everyone.
The word "Common Good" has a specific meaning. It steams from the word "Common" which means the people that share common values at our most basic levels, and "Good" means whats best for the people that share these common values.
What you are talking about is imposed self-interest at the level of the population from one or a small population that do not represent the common good. Not the same thing IMHO.
That's not what common good is. Common good never requires that people share core values.
Common good historically was what's good for the city/polis/country/band/family. Basically, you make some (ideally relatively small) sacrifice to your own interest for the sake of a larger group you share fate with.
There are more formal/mathematical versions of it, for example in Bentham where the common good is essentially a weighted sum over the good to each individual. Rousseau described it almost exactly as the resultant of force vectors. There are more authoritarian versions like in historical Sparta and more recently in Marx and Engels where it's imposed through violence.
> imposed self-interest
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but self-interest is almost by definition not externally imposed. In Marxism one particular vision of the common good is imposed externally via a "revolutionary terror."
c. 1300, "belonging to all, owned or used jointly, general, of a public nature or character," from Old French comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Modern French commun), from Latin communis "in common, public, shared by all or many; general, not specific; familiar, not pretentious." This is from a reconstructed PIE compound ko-moin-i- "held in common," compound adjective formed from ko- "together" + moi-n-, suffixed form of root mei- (1) "to change, go, move," hence literally "shared by all."
Your confusing political language with what came before this. Common good is the will of the people. It has nothing to do with cities, countries, or states. All of those things were created by people that wield political power. This is not the same as the common good. Common good directly relates to what is good for the people that share common values. You have been misinformed, by political society unfortunately.
The idea of common good is centuries older than the appearance of French or the English translation.
It has nothing to do with shared values. It's exactly as I described it above.
Notice the reconstructed PIE means to move together. Common good is about the interests of groups that co-move rather than groups that share values.
This makes sense even in family contexts. What is good for the family is often different from what any one person wants. Think about things like choosing dinner for a big hungry family on a long road trip.
Often the best solution is at best everyone's third or fourth choice because values and desires differ.
So "Common Good" is directly related to "Common Law" which showed up in 509-27 BC Rome during the Republic period and it was a way to have a common understanding between the "Common People" when Rome's political state was trying to use political law against non-Romans. The common people needed a way to protect themselves from the rising emperors and their decrees.
So I understand that you think its about families, but in this context, its really not. It was a way or a method to protect commoners.
When I say value, I mean if we both value freedom then we have a "Shared Value". This is really about the rights of the people which differs what rulers, want for the people. And I mean rulers that want to wield power against the people, for self-interested purposes.
Again that is not what common good is and it does not originate in the Roman Republic.
I'm honestly not sure it's worth responding here or what you're trying to say about Rome. It sounds like you may be confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, which started much later in 31 BCE. For one thing the Roman Republic did not have an emporer. For another it wasn't expanding militarily or ruling non-Romans.
And you also seem to be confusing different uses of "common".
Common generally means something held collectively by a group. By extension it can mean "customary" as in common law rather than statutory law. By extension it also can mean "ordinary" or "plain", as in "common house cat". "Commoners" or "common people" are just "ordinary" people; that is, people without titles.
The only connection between the "common" in "common good" and "common people" is the use of the string "common". The word means different things in the two contexts.
Rome most certainly was expanding militarily and ruling non romans far before it became an empire. The punic wars for example were more than a century before it became an empire.
No the original meaning of "Common Good" is related to "Common Law" And that actually originated in Rome between the Republic and Empire periods. Your focus on the specific dates have nothing to do with the actual originating use of the saying.
It can mean "ordinary" or "plain", but not in the context of "Common Good". I think you are trying to obfuscate the meaning by focusing on the peripherals of the context.
In this context, I disagree.
Its really clear what the good in "Common" means.
Its like principles of what the Constitution was written on. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Principles like these are qualities we all naturally exhibit and as such doesn't need any explanation or qualifications. I know in our modern world people have decided that everything is open to interpretation. But I believe this was indoctrinated into us, over a long period of time, not to consider the human value[0] aspect of our being that we are born with. This was done by watering down the direct meaning of words and slowly changing the perception that humanity doesn't have infinite value and has to rely on external power structures to give it meaning.
This is capitalist mythology. You'll need to account for "best" here because millions of people under the thumb of large-scale genocide, such as the policy decisions to implement poverty (which capitalism requires), likely have something to say about what you think is "best".
Can you present me with an alternative that was implemented, ran for a significant period of time and resulted in a better quality of life for those under it? Also poverty is not genocide, if you are going to present an argument please make it factual. You insult victims of actual genocide and minimize what they have endured with this comparison.
I'm going by how people in the global majority, victims of imposed poverty by empires through debt slavery, who also experience OTHER forms of genocide & recognize poverty for the genocide it is.
Check out the quality of life of the Aka, Baka, and Mbuti tribes. They're genetically and culturally linked to a mother tribe 150k years ago.
So a culture has kept these people going for 150k years. Capitalism has no such capability.
Collaboration, spontaneous improvisation, counterdominant play/decision making/protection, egalitarian, matrifocality, immediate return. Those are values that flourish in an infinite game theoretically and in real life. We just have been taught so many backwards ideas these ideas seem foreign & barely recognizable.
Friend you are comparing civilizations that support hundreds of millions of people to small tribes of pygmies that total maybe 30k people and survive on hunting and gathering. Additionally they only exist in little groups of 50 to a few hundred individuals. How do you see billions of people surviving as hunter gatherers? Or do you forsee the need to cull 95% of humanity? This is not a realistic comparison friend and you know that. The only system that can keep hundreds of millions or billions of people fed and housed is capitalism.
Friend, go run the simulations at scale and get back to me before you keep peddling the religious belief that capitalism is the only way to feed billions.
You have no idea how to scale up collaboration due to separation from indigenous cultures that were praxised for tens of thousands of years & cultivated food forests across America without price tags.
I am sure you know this due to your extensive research and simulations but the average life span of the tribes you mentioned is in the low 20s... Some of your examples are even less than that.
Only 40% of the Aka and Mbuti actually survive to age 15 or greater
I look forward to you explaining how this is actually a good thing. Because currently it looks like your argument is that the 9 billion people on earth should adopt the life style of tiny groups of hunter gatherers that for the most part don't make it out of childhood and those that do generally die in their early 20s or younger.
For reference, the average lifespan in the United States is 77, so more than 3x, approaching 4x. Per your prior arguments, this is a genocide...
Not really - in practice on paper capitalistic countries need tons of socialist policies in order to prevent the system from eating the people it depends on.
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
You can explicitly build the business to say "delivering shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must remember that we live in a society and upon a planet".
>But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
I see little evidence that this is true. If anything, modern VC companies are "externality parasites". They produce positive externalities for some (ie. shareholders), by putting a lot of negative externalities on society as a whole (see for example the cost to democracy, societal cohesion, etc. that comes for Facebook and the like).
Their purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing all sorts of heinous things
There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it.
Human quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.
Voting obviously works, you can vote away capitalism, some countries did that.
The only reason it "doesn't work" is that the countries that did vote away capitalism didn't fare very well, so other countries people are very reluctant to try that again. But they absolutely could if they wanted.
This is a dumb saying. And if you start to apply it to everything capitalism still seems pretty ok. For example: "The purpose of Communism is killing 20+ million people"[1]
I agree that when taken literally, it's a dumb thing to say: literally (i.e., the dictionary definition), the purpose of a system is the reason why it was built, not what it does. But it's a slogan, and slogans don't always make sense taken literally. The point of the slogan is to remind people of the (obvious, I hope) fact that, as I wrote:
> you can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it
If you check my Wikipedia link it shows that the original quote says more or less the same thing: "[this slogan] makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances".
In other words, it doesn't matter what's the historical context of why corporations were created, what matters is what they do now. You can argue, like it was argued, that corporations as a whole currently are a net benefit. My point is that bringing up the historical context of their original purpose adds nothing to the discussion.
As to your other point, I completely agree that it would be useless to try to defend the Staling regime by pointing out what communism was intended to be. That's more or less the point I was trying to make.
That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.
I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all.
Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say).
In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.
It’s pretty rare for businesses to produce positive externalities. Businesses create value and some of that value goes to others, but that normally happens through explicit transactions.
The only way to make that happen is to have that common good be priced into the shareholder value, i.e., removing externalities that allow the privatization of profit and the public subsidies of the remediation of the damage done.
Then don't make a company with shares. This is like complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play football. Anybody who makes his business a company with shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any activity, which isn't structured in this way.
1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone.
2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it.
3. Nobody forces you to watch Netflix.
#1 is rapidly approaching the practicality of “nobody forces you to have money.” Technically true but deeply impractical.
#2 is heading that way. Lots of official info is only available on social media. Travel to certain countries can be difficult if you don’t have any social media presence as they’ll decide you’re trying to hide something.
Would you give to charity? You are pointing at the heart of the prisoner's dilemma endlessly recreated by the very existence of capital: why choose long-term public benefit over a short-term personal gain?
People give to charity what they don't need. If all businesses are expected to be charities, they cease to be profitable and thus cease to function, as no one will bankroll the initial investment required to set up a business without the prospect of making money on it.
Let's look at an example. In order to produce e.g. wind turbines, a large factory is needed, full of expensive machines. Let's assume that the buldings plus the machines all costs $500 million altogether. Where would that $500m come from, if the factory will never be profitable, so entities with money will never bankroll it? The only alternative I can think of is 100% socialism and centrally managed economy, where all businesses are owned and bankrolled by the state. However, in practice all such implementations so far (over probably at least a dozen different countries) has been terribly inefficient and corrupt.
I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with what creates common good - IE policy is like game design where you design the rules in a way that provides an overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.
There is no latitude. They have only one requirement: growth growth growth.
If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will throw money at you to supercharge it.
If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will chase the growth at all means
So you don’t get sued, but you lose control or even your stake or even the whole business. Remember how Uber founder got kicked out? He had a strong hand.
Chilling effect is there one way or another, and even when that does not work adverse selection does.
You have to have a very strong market position to resist the investor pressure. Kinda like Google had twenty years ago.
Or you can have a diverse set of investors who can’t or won’t be swayed by activist investors. But that usually means being public at which point your employees are incentivized by RSUs.
I'm not arguing there isn't an incentive problem. I'm arguing that it doesn't have any basis in statute. The distinction is important because it points to a different solution and different moral culpability for the system's outcomes.
Yeah, but you not getting what you want, you not having own little imperium is not the same as "you having legal obligation".
This amounts to an argument that if doing something immoral gives you money and power, you can not possibly say no and no one can blame you. That somehow more money and power is good enough excuse.
Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too much.
In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such.
In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.
Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't think that's even a real factor here.
That really doesn't follow. Explosive growth guarantees amorality? What sin is inherit to success? Has envy become so embedded in our thinking that success alone is proof of guilt? Or is it just Original Sin style bullshit where everone is automatically guilty?
To succeed, you have to execute many things well and avoid bad luck. Add to this an extra constraint that one also needs integrity or morals and it will drastically reduce your success rate.
My statement will be true as long as having integrity or morals could hinder growth in some way.
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if you deviate from the current standard behavior.
We’ve all seen companies do layoffs just because “Wall Street” was concerned about the economy and then instantly see the stock price spike up.
These negative consequences are all results of bog standard prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
Maybe in theory, but in practice there is a strong power mismatch that causes investors to have a strong influence. Sand Hill learned it's lesson from Facebook/Zuckerberg and now always have a seat on the board. Only outliers like zuck/bezos/similar have the weight to push back against investors. Heck, even Dorsey couldn't for whatever reason.
And even if what you said is true, you can look at the results of years of this system, the difference between companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong case against what you're saying.
It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be replaced by people who are willing to do what the board wants.
The annoying tone is unnecessary. Yes, legally speaking operators can go against the board and get replaced, which they certainly should do if they feel they're being asked to do something unethical. But it's not going to change how the company is run.
For the executive, sure. Not for the impact of the overall incentive structure on the trajectory of the business. Which is what this discussion is about.
The root comment this thread is in reply to had the implication that people are only acting this way because of an inaccurate idea of how strict the legal obligations are, and the other comments are about how that’s obviously not the only force producing the current outcome
Yeah, obviously that's not "the only force producing this outcome." Nobody claimed it was.
But it's important for founders to understand they are not legally obligated to do any specific thing for their shareholders. It is their responsibility to act morally. Yes, there are other incentives and forces at play. "Legal obligation" is not the cop-out excuse that executives claim it is.
Even focusing on short term profit would be fine, if you want to blow up the business go ahead, if those profits were actually shared fairly with shareholders. Too often companies can just dilute their stock over and over, which fucks over individual investors and benefits the 51% owners, and investors don't really get a say, yes there's a vote but if 51% is owned by a few it's not a vote.
Individual investors are largely operating on trust.
> The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality
This "legal obligation" is an internet rumor that does not exist in the real world. Yes, if your company has competing buyout offers of $1m and $2m and the board takes the $1m offer because they received a bribe, it will come up. Otherwise, it never does.
The proof is in the pudding (please go find me even one case where shareholders have successfully imposed their will on a board or executives because of this obligation), but it doesn't even logically make sense. Other than the buyout example, it's hard to think of almost any action a company could take that doesn't have some justification that it is for the benefit of shareholders. i.e. if we make our app too addictive, we risk social backlash and regulatory intervention by governments which will hurt out shareholders. And that's all that is needed, because there is no associated time frame with this obligation.
To be clear, boards and executives might strive to please investors, but it is not based on a legal obligation. An executive that ignores the interests of shareholders might be concerned about their reputation as a capable entrepreneur, risk losing their job, or devalue their own shares, but they are no in legal jeopardy.
Just because the risk of getting successfully sued for making decisions against the interests of shareholders is low, it doesn't mean that it won't influence executive decision making. CEOs want to avoid legal risks above all else and thus the laws around fiduciary duty can have a chilling effect even if judges generally go along with the CEO's interpretation of what is in the interest of shareholders.
I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded and continue to erode.
Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter"
Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or your society will destroy itself.
> Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore.
I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about. Something small could just stay small because none of the big players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by someone else going the VC route before the small company could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs. VC-backed.
Another reason is optimization for profit, combined with competition making it a survival necessity to do this.
Early in a nascent industry, you focus on the core product. You bring scale and scope economies. You make the supply chain more efficient. You improve the logistics. More abundant basic food stuffs for everyone, and more profits for agriculture shareholders. A true win-win.
Later on when the industry matures, the easy wins are all gone. Logistics and agriculture is fully optimized. The only scope for improvement is in marketing, adding sweeteners, and cutting out expensive ingredients. Now it's a lose-win, but from the shareholders perspective only, it's a win.
The problem is, you can't just ask companies to act nicely. While that would be a good start, even if they genuinely wanted to, competition largely forces their hand. The solution is careful and minimal regulation, to deter the pathological late-stage optimizations.
This is what always frustrates me: why do companies need to bother with "pathological late stage optimisations" at all, if not for perverse incentives in the fundamental economic and political structure of how companies operate? Why is reaching a growth plateau perceived as stagnation instead of success? Why must a company feel pressured to grow forever, without bound? What's wrong with building a business to sustainability and equilibrium? Why does this almost never happen? Why do we instead see enshittification literally EVERYWHERE?
Cause some sociopath name Friedman wrote something that the ruling class/ generationally wealthy loved. That business should only serve the owner to the expense of literally everything else.
Since the rich and powerful get what they want. This race to the bottom mentality has saturated anything where a company accepts outside investment. This means any public company and any investment into the company outside of a bank loan. Which is basically every company nowdays since private equity company have bought stake in literally almost everything.
Just a heads up, the experiment was complete fraud and could never be replicated.[1]
I agree with you that outside investment can work as a strong accelerator for these things. It enables founders to externalize responsibility.
However, it is not the main reason. Exploitative companies have existed long before venture capital was invented. In the end every company exists to make money and so is inherently immoral. That is why the state is needed to regulate the market so companies don't hurt society too much.
Those founders didn't get corrupted by evil venture capital, they didn't have that strong of a morality to begin with.
I think the VC thing is indicative of the entire thing; the goal is profit and everything is subordinated to that. This is how the system works and how it is designed to work. When profit and some external thing like social responsibility are at odds, profit is going to win out every time. The mercenary mentality rules the scene.
In Magickal Faerieland, we have regulations to align those 2 things by incentivizing the "goodguy" path and/or disincentivizing the "cackling villain" path but we live in reality where money rules and regulatory capture is a thing. So a Facebook or other megacorp can get away with using neuroscience and psychology to engineer a virtual slot machine with a terrible payout and ExxonMobile et al can get away with being an architect of environmental degradation and the accompanying humanitarian disasters.
Of course VC loan sharking is a major part of the problem. But it's also tiring reading blog after blog of people who say they want to do the right things and do them right or whatever the trendy thing is that month, all as a thinly veiled pretence to get as much funding from whoever wants to give it to them and try to make themselves the next Zuckerberg or Bezos.
If people actually believed in something they'd make it open source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of advertising.
Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:
If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.
So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.
I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
I think Europe is moving g toward digital independence even more. They've still got Instagram and WhatsApp and everything, but I can see them moving more aggressively toward Facebooks core business model (ie, programmatic adverising) and essentially creating a European internet bubble. Would be nice for Europeans to be able to have their own social media sites which operate less aggressively on your attention span - like Facebook circa 2009 or even MySpace. Chronological feeds, less invasive advertising practices.
We are building a social network with chronological feed.
I am thinking how to make it sustainable without raising VC funding but not doing aggressive ad targeting. Obviously people are not going to pay for a social network. So maybe just very generic sponsered links?
Maybe the model should be more like public roads - for-profit companies are involved in building parts of them but they don't control the whole system.
Its not just shareholders, stock based equity also has all the employees pushing profit.
Engineering addiction is also probably more often than not intentional. When all the business metrics/KPIs are stuff like "engagement time", "$ spent", even AB testing of random features leads to manufacturing addiction
Well, yes. Encouraging people to avoid Marxism and all the successive schools of thought has done irreparable damage to this country (and likely the entire west). And I'm not even dogmatic about this: you can read Schumpeter, the father of VC, to reach the same conclusion. Private investment will eat the world and our childrens' lives, even at the cost of self-preservation.
Reductionism is fine when a supermajority of available data paints the same picture, and that's what's happening here.
* Founders aren't trying to solve a problem, they're trying to grab table scraps from VCs and the already-wealthy to try and save their own skins. As a result, it's all about exit strategy, growth, and moat instead of business fundamentals and customer experience.
* VCs and their wealthy backers aren't looking for good business, they're looking for good profit. It's why they'll gladly invest into slop or outright grifts, and why they demand anything they invest into have an exit strategy (i.e., IPO) planned so they can cash out before the company collapses.
* Talent who wants to build a long-term career with a company - and accordingly focus on fixing its flaws, improving the customer experience, and saving expenditures - can't, because companies no longer fundamentally exist to provide long-term solutions and products, only short-term growth YoY. This ultimately ends up harming output and innovation, because why bother giving it your all when such efforts are counter to the "explosive growth" narrative and likely to get you PIPed?
* Retail investors and Business News are left feeding a monster that runs on Fairy Tales and ignorance, promoting big gains and huge losses rather than actual investing advice or corporate accountability.
It's all just a disgusting grift, is what I'm reducing it to, and I can't really fault Founders either since they're just trying to strike gold in an emptying mine shaft before it's closed off or collapses in. They're playing the game they think will net them safety and success...even though they may have better odds on some casino games instead.
And how these shareholders materialize. I don't think show up at guileless founder's workplace with guns and make them offer they can't refuse?
> but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering..
Personally I don't doubt that. But if people are taking outside money while being aware of its effects I don't know what kind of sympathy they deserve.
It can end up being a more circuitous path than you might expect.
For instance, I took investment in my business, about five years in, from a very ethically and strategically aligned individual, as we mutually saw an opportunity to do something good together.
His life took a left turn. Two kids and wife in a horrendous car crash, all left extremely disabled, enormous medical and emotional costs. After a year or so he had little option but to sell his holding in our business, and we allowed it, knowing that his situation had become dire. He sold to a small PE consortium, who again, looked pretty well aligned with what we were doing.
The consortium all then had a falling out, as one member had brokered a deal with a large PE group to be bought out. This ground on for another year or so, us on the sidelines, until eventually the large PE group managed a hostile takeover.
And that’s how we found ourselves with blackstone as our corporate overlords.
It all went to shit over the following years as we were forced to squeeze margins, cut R&D investment, and depart from our original mission to instead gouge our customers.
I ended up leaving, as going to bat for the dark side every morning was beyond corrosive for me, and while it was a pretty terrible financial decision, it saved my life.
The company grinds on, a thing utterly different to what I founded. I don’t ask for sympathy, just… perhaps awareness that taking any investment, no matter how benign, can take you places you’d never wish to go.
It can happen even without investment. I’ve seen businesses where cofounders have had to sell out due to poor health or similar, and the outcomes have ended up pretty much the same.
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality.
Oh 1000%.
I once worked at a company where the founder had famously said many times that he would never take the company public. But then, he had a stroke. And within two years they had an IPO. Started doing what every other 'big company' did instead of their own thing. And from what I heard from folks on the inside, Enshittification happened pretty quick after I left.
The lack of addressing the loose ethics of 'Behavioral Psychologists' working in these fields, is TBH a bit of a stain on the whole profession.
While “maximizing shareholder value” is a huge problem, aren’t there other problems too? Founders wanting to get rich as quickly and as easily as possible, customers/users refusing to pay even for most important services (for example, how many people are willing to pay 5 bucks a month for something as important to modern life as email? But they’re happy to pay 5$ for a crappy Starbucks coffee), lawmakers too old or too corrupt to understand the negative effects of the products/markets they’re supposed to regulate, general public more interested in convenience and cheap entertainment than subjects like privacy, parents simply hooking their kids up with iPads so they don’t have to deal with tantrums (one of my colleagues told me he was raised by TV/internet, not by humans)… and on and on.
I suppose we’re living in an age of unchecked capitalism. But there are other issues too
“Shareholder value” is what turned “we’re a family here” into a joke and cliche. It turns people into lines on a spreadsheet and strips leadership of their ability to care or treat people as humans. It’s represents the very darkest side of capitalism. Im very much a capitalist but it doesn’t mean I have to ignore the realities of it, both good and bad. I’ll take it over all alternatives though as it actually works and improves the lot of society as a whole
For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder, but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC community, which I say "historically"
YC parted ways with the broader HN community at some ill-defined moment coming up on a decade ago. YC started as an inspiring rejection of credentialism and cronyism and slick people jumping the queue in front of tech-focused problem solvers from diverse backgrounds. The values of HN around curiosity, technical meritococracy, tangible solutions to real pain points in the lives of real people underserved by big money tech establishment dynamics were completely aligned with early YC, they went hand-in-glove.
But it got captured by slick dealmakers who managed to cop the hoodie aesthetic and youthful ambition vibe but were the same born-to-privilege punks that have always ruined everything good in computing eventually. Now its messaging is vibe code and gladhand and suck up to whichever political party won last. Its a more insular, more inbred, less substantial network of the "right" kinds of people than the Ivy League was when it stepped on the scene.
And there's nothing inevitable about it, no "big money always goes to shit" story here: its 4 or 5 key people who abruptly had a serious seat at the table and chose very fucking selfishly.
HN is still here geeking out and being a gem on the internet.
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook.
As an outsider I don’t believe it. Morals? I don’t even see a nugget or trace of some elevated goal in all of these stories.
Shareholders or not, the companies have to make money. Now us users have been gaslit for years about us just being too stingy to “pay for the product”, therefore we “become the product”. But all of these gamification/social media platforms were made to be free. Obviously there had to be a path to monetization. Morals or not. And they all end up in the same place.
Duolingo was co-founded by the inventor of Captcha. One of the ideas was to use people as translators, similar to the Mechanical Turk idea of letting people do some chore and using the product. Anyway, they also monetized eventually. Now what has Duolingo actually done for langauge learning? According to many people now, nothing. Look on YouTube. People post about their streaks. I.e. the gamification. The last video I saw was barely about how Duolingo helped at all. They had the typical “of course you can’t use only Duolingo” and then they listed all the other approaches and techniques. Well, did Duolingo serve any role? They said repetition. Well the repetition is for very artificial and out of context words and phrases. That Duolingo learners are like fish out of water in a context where they have to apply their knowledge is a meme at this point.
Another fun, very SC thing[1] about DuoLingo is/was the volunteer community. Yes of course a volunteer community to boost the for-profit platform. That’s how you get Klingon.
The AI-fication, aggressive ads, and pay-to-streak (you can artificially pause a streak for a whole month apparently) has made people worry and complain. And not because they are making a good language learning app worse to use, even. It seems to be mostly that people are hooked to the streak and are now even more annoyed by the hoop they have to go through (the app itself) to maintain it.
So what did Duolingo (DL) achieve? It made people fret and worry about their streak. That’s it. I had a friend who was so glad that he was getting close to a one-year streak on DL. Why? Because then he could quit. I wrote like one or two sentences that I recalled in his target language. He didn’t understand it.
[1] See StackExchange. I remember Jeff Atwood’s very humble blog piece about how he made his millions. It was of course all him but he had a good upbringing and access to good schools of course. No mention of the employees, but that’s just normal capitalist things so that’s fine. But also no mention that he made a platform based on volunteer work. Hmm. Self-made man? In SC culture he is. Because getting users/fools to work for you for free is the ultimate disruption.
I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage.
Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse - the gym makes more money when I use the product less, just so long as I don't leave.
Microsoft office or Mario Kart do not need me to be addicted - they just need me to buy the software. Even Photoshop with a subscription model doesn't pursue addiction strategies - why would they? Just make it useful enough for me to keep paying for it, and that's plenty good. Maybe it's actually closer to the gym in that sense.
Which products are the ones that require addiction?? The ones that are free to use but cost money to provide.
IOW - In many ways this is our fault for expecting social media and many other services to be provided to us for free, relying on ads to pay for it.
I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? My guess is close enough to zero to ensure failure. But I tell you what - I'd probably pay for it myself. And I'd be very lonely.
I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative.
I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic used to pick an ad must be independent of user derived data, including session data, ip address, time of day, country, past viewing history and so on.
This is completely wild to me. I honestly do most of my clothes shopping through Instagram/Facebook ads. I enjoy that targeted advertising shows me new products and companies that I'm interested in, often very niche stuff that I don't come across otherwise. I would so much rather see that than ads for life insurance, penis pills, ambulance chasers, or whatever other bullcrap goes to the lowest common denominator. The ads that get read on podcasts are a great example of this.
If I'm going to pay for something by watching ads, I much rather watch fewer, higher value, more targeted ads. Untargeted ads are less valuable (to me, the advertiser, and the ad publisher), so I would have to see a lot more of them to pay for the content I consume.
I'm really not big on advertising. I dislike ads as much as anyone, especially when they're obnoxious and intrusive.
But I feel like a lot of people, on here especially, have this "all advertising is the devil period lalalala" attitude, but it does have real value. People don't like that it's been taken to a psychologically manipulative science of big brands being shoved down your throat. But I have genuinely found the ad experience on FB/IG to be the best there ever was. I do legitimately find out about things that I end up buying and liking and people ask where I got it and laugh when I say "a Facebook ad."
Founder of a social-media-adjacent startup here — 100% agree that monetization model, moreso than funding etc is the core problem.
The decisions for which I am most grateful my co-founders and I have made, from day one, were to 1) have a monetization model that's not reliant on usage and 2) not set goals against usage.
Granted, we're a bit of a peculiar case because of the market we serve (giving parents a screen-free alternative to smartphones and social media for their kids). But personally, my experience here has given me hope that other monetization models _can_ pave the way for non-addictive social products to flourish.
> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it?
In 2022, mastodon.social was provisioned at a cost of 0.6EUR/year/user for 191k users [1]. This price is payable even by many people in poor countries. People would pay for something like this same as they pay for other stuff, assuming it was well designed and gave users power to do stuff.
0.6 EUR/year/person was the entire cost including moderation and R&D. I don't think any legal costs were incurred. If you built a federated social media where individual instances are responsible for their own moderation, then the software maker doesn't have to incur those costs.
And yet probably less alone than when using polluted and terrible social media.
I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.
Those interested in this branch of the discussion might find Dave Winer’s blog series about building an open social network on top of the RSS standard worth a read. Here’s one of many posts: http://scripting.com/2025/06/28/211301.html
But even paid business models get polluted with the usage driven metrics over time. Netflix is paid but now has advertisements. They have stated that their main competitor is sleep, which is obviously detrimental to the user. How do we prevent this from happening for such a paid social media?
Netflix introduced an additional billing model to cater to those folks who would prefer ads to a subscription fee, but has not removed the no-ads model for a higher fee. I'm happy to pay for my ad-free Netflix, and I respect that others might want to choose differently. This is not a dark pattern, it's a light/good/gold (?) pattern.
As long as the founders aren't looking to make billions, it's very possible to run a healthy social media platform, as evidenced by Front Porch Forum [1]. 20 employees, human moderators (gasp)! There's also Metafilter which is paid [2].
Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis.
As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever.
But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a million dollars.
That's why I like it. To raise funds, they sell books, playing cards, instructional videos. With non-invasive "tiny ads" which they self-parody.
Small is beautiful. The current internet is ruled by evil reptiles seeking to rip off your time, your data, your privacy, your friends... "Don't be evil" is dead and gone.
Turn back the clock 30 years. I did. And I'm happy.
This may be a misinterpretation tangent, but I play tennis and do a bit of inline skating, and I find one of the benefits is it provides a grounding to the real, physical world; time away from the constant feed of new shit on the internet. I also get in-person human interaction, which is an additional grounding effect. I've made plenty of friends as a result of both activities, and these friends cover a wide spectrum of personalities and backgrounds and life experiences.
This isn't necessarily turning the clock back 30 years, it's just finding some (of the plenty of) other activities I can enjoy that don't require a screen.
Additionally, for both of these activities, if your mind is elsewhere you can't do it. You have to be 'present'. Tennis is technically difficult to play proper shots (and I'm not particularly good at it, I enjoy the challenge of getting better) and inline skating, well, if you take your mind / eyes off your environment for a second you're putting your bodily integrity at risk. Having that 'presence' or singular focus is also grounding. It clears a lot of the other shit that builds up.
And, not that I feel this viscerally, there's no manipulation of my intent around my activity: I don't get derailed onto a track I wasn't intending to follow.
Midunderstanding tangent, I don't think so. Arnold says to get off the phone, get out into the real world. Totally aligned with what you are saying.
I signed up for the gym, got my partner to do the same, sought out and found some good volunteer work where I was needed. Too much screen time is not good, but old school newsletters that are relevant work just fine. They always have. Be the change you want to see, all that mumbo jumbo can actually work. Sure community can be the catalyst.
looks good. old school discussion sites were just fine. The larger corporations are big scams, ripping off your personal details, your relationships, your photo library, and who knows what else, and up to 99% of users have no clue. Nothing to be gained, everything to lose.
Even facebook emojis can be entered into the record in a court of law during a divorce proceeding. A fleeting moment of trying to make someone feel better, or more likely, to get a thumbs up, becomes a permanent electronic record completely removed from fleeting circumstances. That nonsense is potentially very dangerous
Going to recommend "Addiction by Design" here. Superb book about the addiction design dynamics in the gambling industry and very reminiscent of what we see in the smartphone/internet universe today. Shout out to the forgotten HN user who recommended it originally, one of the best and most salient books I've read in years.
This reminds me of my borderline exhausting quest to build a wiki for golf that isn’t extractive like most golf sites.
Trying to bootstrap it without any funding is a lot, but necessary, and I have to run it on a shoestring. The frustrating part is that with all networks the flywheel is everything. Once you get the product on people’s phones, the value is easy to see, but to get the app in their phones, you need a bunch of money to create value to get people there.
This is why the VC funding is so pernicious and why projects like mastodon, lemmy, and pixelfed are so difficult to get off the ground. The point is almost always the network itself more than the product.
I’ll keep trying to just do it slow and steady, even if it takes me a decade. I honestly don't care if I fail because I know the people out there that care about golf course architecture just want a place to talk about the courses they love.
With technological products in particular—where an idiosyncratic nerd with an old computer under the desk can run a vibrant forum, a couple of plucky young “cofounders” can conjure a company from nothing, and HN (at least at one point [0]) can sway the entire tech culture from a single process on a single server—isn’t it an option to… not grow?
I guess the LLM era makes credible products more capital-intensive than they used to be, but even so, the vendors are pricing their stuff aggressively, and even when they try to squeeze the prices later, half these foundation models that are better-than-last-year’s-SOTA are open-source!
If you want to play with lots of money and seek out lots of money, there’s lots of money swirling around seeking to involve you in that game. But if you just want to make something nice and human-scale and small, what better time than now?
The path to billions of bucks may require mercenary bucks-extracting behavior, but that’s not the same as a growth imperative being an inevitable force of nature.
I can’t help but feel like the Small Web folks are on to something.
I was talking with a friend who is a camp counselor for a small summer camp the other day and they said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices.
This power intermittent reinforcement in the on-ramp of addiction is scary powerful.
Do we have any ways to innoculate ourselves and the future generations against it?
The author poses changing the game which is support. I guess the trendy “dopamine fast” is a tool against this or weekly screen free time. Maybe more education on intermittent reinforcement or a D.A.R.E-like program for apps (a this one is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not really).
I've only been able to find articles that counter it[1][2][3][4], and nothing more rigorous than a Pew survey.
It feels right, and I recall feeling similarly about certain items/events as a teen, but teens aren't known for having the most measured interpretations of reality.
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
You effectively need or greatly benefit from gas, water, electricity and an ISP.
What do you really get out of social media? I mean other than most of you getting crippling anxieties about things that aren’t even real, of course.
Sure sure, I know, everyone wants it because they need to share photos of the kiddos with grandma out of country. No one needs it because they enjoy the shallow bullshit and dopamine and snarky retorts that enforce their ideology.
Social media is relied on by a lot of people for official notifications. When I was in high school, my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days. I'm sure there are lots of valid reasons for schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, official media networks etc. to have social media accounts, and for regular people to follow them.
I've always thought it would be a good idea for governments to run their own mastodon servers for this, but something else with accounts (not publicly) tied to real identities could be interesting.
> my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days
Believe it or not, they post that on their own websites.
We had to turn on the TV and watch the marquee they would add to all shows. If you missed your school you had to go to another channel to see where in the alphabet they were.
You have not made a convincing argument. Social media has specifically moved away from synchronous time-prioritized posting in favor of algorithm engagement. So I can’t accept “notifications” as a legitimate use.
Social media is a pretty wide term and includes networks where you mostly talk to your friends and relatives to networks where you mostly consume content from strangers.
The former has a clear benefit (especially where it challenges legacy industries with exploitative pricing like mobile phone networks) and even the latter can benefit you by exposing you to new ideas and information.
That social media is incentivized to push meaningless but addictive fluff over genuine communication due to monetary incentives is the point of TFA. This is a reason for making social media a public utility, not against it.
So the master plan is to let governments (known for tech illiteracy and 20-year procurement cycles) regulate hyper-evolving social media platforms?
Why teach people to think critically or resist engineered dopamine traps when we can have a bunch of career bureaucrats draft laws while using Wordpad or Internet Explorer to Google “AI” xD
Regulation doesn't have to be at the level of controlling how technology is designed. It can be more creative, at the level of organizations or incentives, for example:
- Require advertising companies to follow special rules, including only doing advertising and nothing else
- Fund an agency that measures the health harms of large platforms and imposes fines or restrictions based on harm
I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.
Battery life isn't as good as I expected, but I do leave the backlight on quite a bit. I'm not a big phone gamer, but some people do enjoy playing original (black and white) game boy games on them.
Texting works very well. I'm typing this on the phone right now. It's one of the smoothest eink devices I've ever encountered.
Camera isn't the greatest but it's fine for everyday needs. I haven't tried a video call yet. I imagine it will work okay, though. Tap to pay works fine for me, too.
Bogey man staff psychologists aren't to blame for these woes, and they certainly aren't some unstoppable force with reins to all things you do.
The Internet was "addicting" long before there was ever a concept of social networks the way that there is today. I used to sit on my computer from sun down to sun up way back in the mid 90s, and I knew hundreds of other people that did the same thing.
I've been "addicted" to social networks that predate modern capital schemes, such as message boards, IRC, AIM, ICQ, MMORPGs, and so on.
For that matter—the apps that communities are using that aren’t so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns—like the one you and I are using now—could it be that they’re at some level the norm, they’re just kind of boring beyond the small group of people who find them useful?
Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad—but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes it).
To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer to the “tea” pattern than the “viral growth” paradigm. And those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to companies that primarily do real-world stuff—those tend to take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But maybe I’m just old fashioned :)
You should look at the history of tea closer, namely the Opium Wars and how the desire to not deflate their economy via consumption lead to it. Technically also a demonstration of the harm of bad economic practices likd precious metal standards and mercantalism as well.
I was addicted to reading newgroups using Larry Wall's trn program.
In trn, it is very easy to get a new screenful of text to appear, but it is hard to go back to what you were reading 3 screenfuls ago (unless you are still in the same message you were in 3 screenfuls ago, in which case, to get back, you could scroll up 3 times) which discourages reflection, which leaves fewer reasons not to constantly seek out the next dopamine hit (namely, the next passage of text that teaches you something).
My point is that neither trn nor the newsgroups were in any way VC-funded. There also weren't any non-VC-funded startups or companies involved: when I started browsing them in 1991, the software that ran the newsgroups was entirely designed, implemented and operated by volunteers. Yes, these volunteers mostly worked for tech companies, universities or governmental research labs (because in those days, most people with internet connectivity got it through their workplace and most normal workplaces did not have internet connectivity) but their involvement in the newsgroups did not figure into their employer's evaluation of their work performance.
My point is that VCs are not the whole of the problem. Not even the profit motive is the whole of the problem. The problem can show up in a program distributed under an open-source license for hobbyist or communitarian reasons.
The problem is not the apps, the problem is the users. Which means the problem is human nature.
Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against.
Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion.
The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror.
Absolutely not. People are not asking for dark patterns to engineer their behavior to maximize retention. This is like locking a kid in a room full of candy, and then blaming them for gorging themselves.
I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?
The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention?
If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.
Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.
Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.
Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.
BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.
It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry.
Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.
Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.
Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?
I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says.
The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block).
Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
> Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
Valid question - however I have a feeling that for shaping perception of such behaviors we need a stronger middle class - and my hope for it shrinks every day
By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?
I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful market share, which would help reduce time the world spends on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps
That's a narrative that makes no sense. If a company is profitable, it doesn't "die". If customers like your product and their friends are on your platform, they have no reason to leave to another.
Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”.
But that’s not exactly true, is it?
Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today.
Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.
Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.
In most places liquor, while legal, is seriously regulated, and alcoholism is considered a sickness worth treating. Alcohol's effects are visibly debilitating, from poor driving to the very ability to stand without falling or speak coherently.
Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos, etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences are much more underhanded.
> We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.
I deleted an app every month until my phone was so boring I threw it in a drawer and canceled my cell phone subscription. It confuses and annoys everyone around me, but my attention span, happiness, and productivity have skyrocketed so I really do not care what the addicts think. It works for me.
I truly encourage everyone to consider how humans survived before smartphones. All of that still works fine today. 5 years cell-phone free.
No cell phone at all as I do not wish to have my location sold, rely on proprietary tech, or to be reachable at all times. I also use cash exclusively IRL so my digital footprint away from home is virtually zero.
I am happiest being intentional and present in whatever I am doing. I am reachable from my desktop by email, matrix, or VoIP SMS, when I am at my desk and have been able to run a profitable security research and consulting business this way.
I do have a very small laptop I carry when I am going to be away from my desk more than one business day, but the overwhelming majority of the time I have no electronics of any kind on my person when I leave home.
Typically I carry a mechanical watch, a micro-wallet, and sometimes a notebook, or mechanical puzzle.
My go-tos are the CIGA Eye Of Horus and the Bradley Element, both using a Leatherman Tread for a band with TreadLinks adapters so I always have some basic tools with me which get used a surprising amount.
So what’s wrong with open source social network ? They don’t have the issue mentioned, because they don’t have investor there is no need to optimize kpi and when it’s optimized the infrastructure cost can be minimized a lot.
See mastodon for instance.
Yet it doesn’t catch up in popularity, seems like people do prefer the traditional Facebook, twitter and instagram.
You can only show a donkey where water is but you can’t force it to drink.
I read and enjoyed the post, but also found it a bit directionless. Yes, I think a lot of people agree that addictive social media is a problem. What's the solution?
> The deeper issue is that we’ve outsourced our human connection to systems designed for profit. Real connection happens in the margins that can’t be monetized. The conversations that don’t generate data, the relationships that don’t scale, and the moments that can’t be optimized for engagement.
This sounds profound, but this is a problem that predates social media. People went to shows and music festivals to see art and connect with others - these are systems also designed for profit (and delivering art as their second thing.)
The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money. The suggestion the author makes: "improve third spaces where people connect directly, authentically, without intermediation by systems designed to extract value from their attention", except someone has to pay for those third spaces, and people won't always want to visit them because we like dopamine, so we might go to the bar, or back on social media, or to video games or tv shows instead. A slow pace - boredom - breeds creativity and connection, but it's also boring, and it's hard to get people to stay with it (I might be projecting.)
> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.
On a different note, this closing feels very, very ChatGPT, and whether it is or isn't, the fact that AI tone is permeating our writing makes me really sad.
"The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money."
It's not that much of a problem because it doesn't cost that much money.
A full rack and 1gb at he.net costs something like $350/mo. I think it's $500 if you get the entire 10gb. Very fast servers are available for, basically, shipping charges on ebay.
The cost that seems prohibitive is all of the flashing lights and fancy imagery and reactive design, etc.
Further, the frameworks and scaffolding that enable all of the tracking and ads ... are themselves expensive and this complexity becomes self-reinforcing.
A final unnecessary set of costs is the neurotic compulsion for 5-9s reliability and perfect, instantaneous responsiveness from every geography.
What does it cost to run lobste.rs ? Metafilter ? HN ?
I think any reasonably resourced individual could do it as a hobby in their spare time - especially if you strip away the CDNs and the load balancers and the expensive frameworks, etc.
> We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.
> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.
In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?
He's not. Anything he has in mind is socially unacceptable and he knows it.
We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea and they can't agree on anything.
The author doesn’t suggest it, but the implicit solution is public funding for social goods.
That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding for social media that is not supported other ways.
Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social media.
And whats more, there is only one law you need to change. You simply need to remove common carrier exemptions from hosts so that if false or misleading information is delivered to a user from a platform, that platform can be sued for damages.
Its the rule that newspapers and TV need to live by, social media should play by the same rules.
The platforms then simply need to protect themselves my making sure they accurately identify users posting on their networks, so they can pass the cost of any lost lawsuit onto the original poster.
One positive that I have seen lately among older teens, is they are starting to realize how much of a waste of time staring into a screen all day is. At some point, you realize that life is short and watching short clips for hours on end is robbing you of that.
> We need a fundamental re-evaluation of what our phones should be for, whether these platforms can ever return to their original purpose of actually bringing us together instead of keeping us scrolling
Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.
This is an idealized version of real life. If youre autistic you know the pains of having to feign every time in order to not stand out because of your inexpressions or how you dont find what others say very interesting. On top of that, most things youre interested on are in some small forum on the internet where its the only small space where you find your peace.
I agree with some things especially about how we spend so much time on unreal things but lets not idealize real life where if you dont talk about something, youre boring. And that something is most of the time about critisizing others all the time. We truly prefer being angry or very sad rather than alone. Thats basically why the algorithm works. It exploits our solitude. But its being built exponentially, its just the natural step on books, radio, tv , each medium more summarised, quick and polarising and monolithic than the previous one.
> Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together.
Agreed. Social networks not only didn't bring us together, they've actually done the opposite and made us more tribal. Excellent book on the topic is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear us Apart by Nicholas Carr.
OP mentions how Facebook introduced engagement algorithms to Instagram and how Twitter followed suit, but doesn’t mention that Facebook was also the first to popularize engagement algorithms in 2011 via their News Feed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)#History
How do you differentiate between addiction and people really liking something? In my opinion, unless people try to stop doing the thing but they can't will themselves to do that, it isn't an addiction.
It is not OK to dilute terms used to describe serious problems. I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect. Mere dependency or development of a habit isn't addiction. addiction is those things plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort.
Perhaps a good litmus test might be a person's ability to go on a week-long vacation without their phones, internet or whatever the supposed addiction might be.
There are addictions like Porn or eating-disorders that can be exasperated by tech, but they're not "technology usage" addictions, they're "addictions that can be enabled by technology".
> addiction is [dependency] plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort
> I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect
Which planet do you live on? It's hard to read this in good faith.
Nobody has a "technology usage" addiction. The digital dopamine drip-feed in your pocket delivers by design in a way a spoon or double-entry bookkeeping does not, despite the fact that you can use the spoon to get high on a substance you traded for money.
It sound like you are well educated on the mechanics of addiction, using terms like "dopamine" as if that indicates addiction. People get dopamine from all sorts of every day activities and interactions, care to explain how that indicates addiction? If I exercise habitually (which gives tons of dopamine) do I have an addiction or just a habit I enjoy?
Did you know that even LSD/Acid has no biological/medical addiction property, but caffeine does? Addiction requires a literal rewiring of the brain at a biological level.
And please try to avoid the passive-aggressive "which planet do you live on" tone, it doesn't help with the whole civilized discussion thing on HN :)
the difference is simple, addiction is the compulsive/habitual action of something that does not have positive effects, more likely negative than neutral. For example, being "addicted" to gym is fine, because even if you enjoy the dopamine after, not the actual exercise, it's still good for you overall, and you cannot really overdo it. Caffeine makes you more productive, and you cannot really spiral, hence why caffeine is legal, but opioid drugs are not.
But for tech, scrolling tiktok for 5 hours a day, definitely does not have positive outcomes. It's like gambling. It's dopamine hit for dopamine hit's sake, and the delivery system is actively harming you.
If a person has a bad habit of needing to drink a bottle of beer and drive to work every day, would you call that an addiction or just a bad habit? I would call the drinking an addiction but the drinking-and-driving a bad habit.
Caffeine is a good example you mentioned, it is in fact addictive. It forms a chemical dependency similar to nicotine. Not all addictions are harmful and not all bad habits are addictions. The 'dependency' is what qualifies the habit as an addiction, in other words, you can't function or function well without the habit.
Empty comment from me but thank you for being more nuanced than most about what constitutes an addiction. It’s tiring to listen to the HN wringing in some performance of outrage of who can be the most offended yet least affected by the article.
(The moderator(s) are praised endlessly but have done a terrible job of steering the community. They’ve merely shut out voices that were the loudest and most disagreeable, a phyrric victory at best)
There are plenty of addictions where the incentive to stop never appears, and I wouldn't call those "not" addictions just because someone hasn't tried to stop or had a reason to.
Scientifically speaking, I would expect that pattern of habit to be studied, and for individuals to be unable to quit, and for actual electro-chemical rewiring of the brain (as nicotine,caffeine and harder drugs do) to be established.
Until then, why can't it just be called a habit? addiction very strongly implies inability to quit. Have you seen the 90's congressional testimony of tobacco CEO's all swearing on oath that Nicotine isn't addictive? That's how strong of a case you have to make for an addiction to be established. If you dilute the term and use it anonymously with "habit" then actual addictions can be dismissed or crooked people that facilitate addictions can avoid consequences.
At the very least, there needs to be a pattern of inability to quit the habit. Positive reinforcement signals are not in themselves indicators of addiction (case in point: LSD/Acid -- it isn't considered addictive, neither is good tasting food on its own).
I disagree, consider someone who is rich enough to afford a heroin addiction without ending up dead, in jail or institutionalized. They may never have a rock bottom that makes them question their use and try to stop. Their quality of life might drop, they may lose friends, family, business, etc, but they are insulated from the kinds of real pressures that force people without means to stop.
I would not say that person does not have an addiction. They are just as much of an addict as the person who shoots heroin and can't stop despite being broke, arrested for stealing, etc.
Addiction and mental illness tend to be defined by their impacts on people's quality of life and impact on functioning, whether that is just functioning basically, maintaining long-term healthy relationships or just being happy without substances.
In your example, I agree with you, they do have an addiction. It does not contradict with what I said. The person not needing to stop and their inability to stop if they tried are two different things. Heroin does form a chemical dependency, where it could even be life threatening to quite cold-turkey, and therefore it is addictive.
Unlike mental illness, addiction is defined by formation of a dependency. sometimes that dependency is at the biological/chemical level, sometimes it is a psychological dependency (can be caused by mental illness), not nevertheless a dependency must exist that prohibits the addict from functioning without the cause of the addiction. Bad habits can cause adverse impacts just as addictions can, and addictions (like coffee - which forms an actual biological rewiring/dependency, people get severe migraines when trying to quit it) can be harmless unless you're trying to quit.
I don't think this is correct. I believe the clinical definition of an addiction requires it to be actively harmful to your life - meaning, if you're "addicted" to something but it's good for you, it's not an addiction. Because the addiction part requires you doing something self-destructive.
> Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission.
Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time.
They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.
> Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users".
Right, which is impractical, and after direct democracy comes representational democracy. Eventually you get things like libraries or public parks, public goods managed by government employees. The main difference this time is the need for more transnational cooperation. Other than that, it should be relatively easy and cheap.
This is about determining which content a user wants to see and showing it to them without having influence over that selection be susceptible to influence by third parties.
I'll concede that there aren't heterarchical solutions to all of our problems, but it does not follow that there isn't a heterarchical solution to this one.
Maybe the solution is that these services shouldn't be free, and you should pay for your usages. Then a non-profit could run an Instagram / tiktok clone and there would be no incentive to make the app more addicting, addiction would be even self-regulated to an extent by the fact that watching 10 hours of video might cost $5
It's not about addiction. It's about providing value.
>The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers.
>Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.
This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction.
>Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics.
Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value.
>Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?
Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.
To add to this, BeReal flamed out because it was a gimmick that was quickly copied and then forgotten by all the other platforms.
Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-algorithmic TikTok would have no users.
And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse experience.
Monetization is the problem, not funding. Better monetization methods haven’t arisen because it’s impossible to compete with free. On the other hand I think it’s clear that the status quo is not creating unrealized value, but is actually causing tremendous harm and are a net negative. People who argue otherwise either have holy arguments about the infallibility of the market or a direct financial interest in the continuation of the ad sponsored status quo. The solution would be new laws that attack the profitability of today’s primary monetization method, not the actual act of social media itself.
Doing so would clear the undergrowth for the true innovators to take over and we’ll know who they are when people pay for their products, as functioning markets have always intended.
The best thing we could possibly do, besides throwing Musk and Zuckerberg in The Hague, is destroy targeted advertising as a business model. Everything, absolutely all of this is done so they can make fractions of a cent off of clicks. So long as they can, they will do everything possible to damage your brains into clicking more.
I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better product, because the product become the ad space.
Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
This is all true, but it's definitely not the full story. I'm addicted to HN despite it not being engineered for engagement. (though _technically_ it has taken investor money hahaha)
The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally).
The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours?
It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc.
If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users.
To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns.
Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.
it is. There are many websites and applications that I use, like wikipedia and linux / kde that could help if they picked an application like Mastodon and promoted it on their site. I only use social media about once a month so I am far from expert but an ad supported open source facebook clone that stayed non profit by sending its profits to other open source sites would be ideal.
There is still a deeper problem, which the article didn't tackle. We don't need social media in general. Some forums and platforms for geeks and freaks are enough. We don't need perfectly orchestrated or fairly designed apps to simulate genuine connection, which works best without any digital help what so ever.
So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other.
The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.
I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source.
Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.
It’s very obvious in 2025, have deleted all my social accounts, (maybe still a bit of reddit). Kids are definitly not allowed even close to it.
100% correct it’s about the business model/funding. Just make it in your basement and don’t take vc capital and let it take a decade and you’ll be the only used social network.
I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website
Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?
Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.
> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?
Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea.
Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move.
Social networks are even more difficult to bootstrap because they’re not worth paying for if you can’t find people to socialize with. Nobody wants to sign up for an empty social network.
Even the free social networks have a hard time getting started. There were dozens of Twitter competitors created after Twitter was acquired, but most of them languished. The few that have survived have their own problems that are driving many of their own fans away.
Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building a "100 year company".
Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on.
I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product.
Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.
Maybe they needed the staff to build the software back then and now they could be leaner cos the product is already built. Maintaining is much easier than building.
In all honesty, it doesn't seem like 400 people were really needed to build the software. If you just look at credits in Adobe Premiere, for example, there's not 400 people in there, and it's a way more complex product than what Evernote is/was.
Given how many complaints about Google search you regularly see on this website and elsewhere, you would think there will be a lot more people willing to pay for non shitty search. And yet Kagi does not have enough paying users to fill a football stadium. To me, this validates GP’s point about how people love to talk about paying for services and then proceed to not pay for any services.
Kagi doesn't have network effects stacked against them. If your friends don't use Kagi, you still benefit from it. The same is not true for social media.
The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach is the VC part. Looking and making sure that there's a market for the widget your factory produces is just due diligence.
You description is probably spot on, but boy I’d love to have a version of Instagram where I could just pay $5/month and get a time-sorted stream of photos of my friends’ babies, Piña coladas with a beach background, and sweaty mirror selfies in a gym without any stupid ads in the middle.
People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an opportunity to poach some communities.
Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs.
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.
> but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work
Even large, free, well-funded social networks are failing to get significant traction or running into echo chamber problems (Bluesky).
I've been hearing for years that a paid social network would work, but if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
If you want to see a real-world example of people squirming out of their claims that they'd pay for ad-free services, take a look at any HN thread discussing YouTube premium or their ad-block evasion efforts. The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it, yet when cornered the same audiences who claimed they'd pay for an ad-free version suddenly come up with a multitude of new excuses for why they're refusing to pay. My personal favorite claim (which invariably surfaces in every thread) is when people say they would happily pay for YouTube premium if they weren't so aggressive about adblockers.
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.
Is this really so? Let's try doing the math: you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business (is this the right number? not sure, feel free to correct me). At $2/month, that requires 25000 paying users.
Difficult, but not impossible. At $5/month (the $3 difference wouldn't trigger any price sensitivity, talking from real experience) that's 10000 users. If your service actually provides value, you can crank it even higher. Again, difficult, but totally within the realm of possible.
if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
Because the "traction" needed to make free and paid social network work is vastly different. You need insane scale (millions or tens of millions of users) to make free social network viable, hell, my stomach hurts from only thinking about it. A paid social network business, run with certain austerity, can be profitable with one thousand paid users.
The hard part is how to acquire that 10000 paying users and how to make them stay.
I think a the problem is for every social media user who finds it valuable enough to pay, there are ten more who don’t use it enough justify paying. And if you only serve the first group but not the later, then the first group will just get bored and move back to X or Instagram, or they just ditch social media entirely and move into private group chats. And if you serve the later then your operation expenses will multiply.
> Do the math on how many people are necessary... you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business
Using the heuristic that HR costs are 2x the gross salary, the 10 people are earning 30K/year gross salary (no bonus). And I'm not leaving any room to pay for the compute/storage infra.
> The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it
Perhaps for you (in the US, I assume). The price is the same everywhere in the world, wages aren't. If you've the choice between paying for food and ad-blocking YouTube, or paying YouTube but having no money for food, the choice is obvious. Just like people here claiming Photoshop is an affordable piece of software...
i think that people vastly overstate the costs of this sort of thing and it's super bizarre. if you're treating this as a big official corporation™ and such and want to pay 500 devs like $200k/year or something to make work, then yeah you're gonna have problems.
but if you want to build a social network and aren't dreaming of being gazillionaires for it (which is quite reasonable), then you can get by very easily. how do I know this? because... well it's being done successfully. not was done successfully, is done successfully.
you can probably even get people to help out on it.
you can build a social network with a dedi running nginx hosting your Python application running on a Linux box backed against Postgres (and redis for session storage, although even that is a bit overkill) for like $80/month deployed with a "deploy.sh" script that you run to kick the damn thing into running (Docker is used in dev only, but could easily work here). should you probably add health checks or whatever? yeah. it still works really well.
this scales well past the 100k users mark.
what about video/images/etc? well, this nginx server happily sends out user uploaded video storing them as files on a bog standard ext4 filesystem. backups exist of the site.
the "stack" i mentioned here isn't fancy or particularly tightly optimized, it's in fact pessimized in a lot of ways. hell I know there were a gazillion ways we could improve performance of our application. show the backend app to a game dev and they'd probably want to start strangling people with how poorly optimized most of the actual app is.
and still, it scales well.
again, I stress that this isn't some theoretical idea, this is actively being executed. the entire venture makes money for the team from the users who willingly (and unforcibly in order to use the service, the actual site is free to use in its full form) give money. this isn't ZFS. this isn't Rust. this isn't using some blue-green deployment. this isn't spending hours toiling away at which sysctl to set to squeeze every last cycle out of each box. this isn't behind some massive CDN with "internet scale" boxen or even (for the video serving part) behind any anti-DDoS service.
it's just a matter of doing actual engineering and being willing to actually build the things you want to build.
I like stories like these, but I think you just never hit a breaking point with the infra and approaches you got. You've never exceeded your ext4 volume size, so no need for object storage. You've never had a server die, so one dedi box is fine. You've never had a paying customer call you with an issue, so oncall support is not needed.
yeah, i mean i guess what i'm trying to say is that the breaking point is very far up there as computers have gotten towards breakneck speeds, especially on the technology side, for the goal being achieved. it's downright difficult to hit the limits unless you're throwing effectively a DDoS at it.
i think the big thing though is that it's a community and so people are actually willing to support that even if it means the amount of 9s of availability is slightly fewer (although in practice, many providers bust right through their "9s" SLAs without a care in the world) and given a migration from a VM provider to the dedi occurred, migrations obviously can happen if failure presents itself.
Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success based on user base.
But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.
I’m not going to pay for something and still be the product. These sites would have to be fundamentally different from what they are today, for me to justify paying for them, starting with: they should not be collecting, selling, or profiting off of data about me. They should also not be deciding for me what ways I can use their products.
People bemoan “nobody’s willing to pay for an online newspaper” and that’s true: they won’t pay for them in their current user-monetizing form. Same with YouTube: I’m not going to pay for an ad-free YouTube in its current form: with auto-playing next videos, algorithmic recommendations, Shorts, and sponsored content embedded in some creators’ videos. Give me a different, better product that does not try to monetize me, and I might pay for it.
Only if people pay. Which they won't when there's nobody else on there. How do you get your first 100k users?
You might say, well, start with 1000 users. But 1000, or 10,000 isn't enough to make a social network interesting. Maybe you could get around this by making it about a specific niche to start with. But that probably won't work, and if it does, you'll end up stuck in that niche.
On the other hand, I don't think this idea is as impossible as people say it is. It's just highly unlikely to be successful, and far more complicated than simply paying someone on Upwork to make it for you.
If you’re not trying to make a business out of it, you don’t even need that much money. You could set up a Mastodon server and invite your friends. It might not get a lot of attention, but it will work.
It works for a niche (probably a professional one) but not for general population. You'd be hard pushed to get mum and pop to pay for this when FB is free and already has everyone on there. To them your new network seems inferior. It is more expensive and has less friends.
As a fun fact this existed circa 2002 in a big way in the UK. The site was friendsreunited. I'd love to have that back (along with associated hype a 5 quid a year pricing)
If you want to launch a big viral marketing campaign, you also need someone who's willing to trade your predictions of future revenue for cash today, and VCs are by definition the people interested in making that trade. For something that depends on network effects, slowly trickling out one new ad every time you get 10 new signups isn't going to work.
My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering.
That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?
I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naïve hope indeed. Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee, are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of digital experience that they envision" does not maximise profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will be different this time and that now corporations will happily hand out everything for free and users will be empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it. The great thing about free markets is that those who want to will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small just like it is now.
Building the social media platform you want to see isn’t really the problem though. They are relatively easy to build, the hard part is making it valuable enough to attract users and earning enough to keep it running.
Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core challenge there.
The article mentioned that we can reconnect offline life and redesign the platform to encourage real human interaction instead of endless scrolling. Imagine a social app that encourages you to exit the screen and meet friends instead of constantly scrolling. It should feel good.
I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.
And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.
Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.
Easier is not always better.
I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*
What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?
My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay. Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the change.
I can't see why wouldn't it work. You definitely have some options. Group or family subscriptions is one. Then you can have extra charges for people for example that post above the average (it would make sense to extra charge those who abuse posting). If someone is unable to pay for some reason don't cancel the account(s) simply make those read-only. So even if they don't pay they are not excluded. Bear in mind that people pay for lots of subscriptions! Streaming services, newspapers, vpns, etc. So again if is setup as a profitable but not greedy profit business it should work. One of the key things is convincing people why using a non-manipulative social network is a way better choice than the "free" options. I'm not very good with business ideas but I do believe that there's absolutely room for a healthy social network out there.
What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system.
So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.
Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.
Perhaps this all goes even deeper - it's screen addiction, not only social media addiction, though social media in 2025 is a very powerful and addictive drug (in all senses of it)
Been going on long before Silicon Valley was even a thing. Sugar industry for example.
> What might actually work
This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.
Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern.
Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.
This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my adjacent comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009
Indeed. The first thing I think of when I read "engineered addictions" is fast food like McDonalds and Subway. People work very hard to make sure the taste and smell is addictive but that the food is not satiating.
For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.
Honestly it always comes back to, we need a healthier relationship with our tools. The phone, social media, etc. It's all a tool. And yes it can be highly addictive but so are drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. all easily accessible and how we deal with it comes down to ourselves. It's what environment you put yourself in, and if that environment is one that includes a lot of screens then there's a sliding scale as to how corrupted you'll become by it. If you're at places where theres alcohol and cigarettes I mean it's highly likely you're going to smoke and drink. The only things that really beat all of this is a way of life that recognises that it can or is poisonous and many things must be avoided e.g get off social media. It was built to be addictive, that's not going to change.
As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
algorithm feed addiction is unsolvable, at least without some new drug.
As an immigrant to the US, I found dessert in US contains much more sugar than where I was. And when I make/recommend less sugary food, friends don't like it even though some of them admitted that's healthier.
so similar to diabetes, I would expect Ozempic for algorithm feed addiction will be available one day to solve this, or at least sounds like so (although I'm not fully convinced).
It may sounds dystopia, but addiction is a builtin feature of late stage capitalism, and it's already too late to turn around.
It’s not just social media. Externalized financialization ruins everything. Private equity firms quickly gut everything they buy from plumbers to health clinics (and you still have no choice but to buy their services because they “consolidate” the competition). It’s capitalism gone mad: financial incentives disconnected from any other considerations.
It a seems pretty simple mistake from almost the first step:
> To get funding, you need users. To get more funding, you need exponential growth. Growth becomes the primary metric
No, you don't. This exponential user scaling theory of investment is a sickness that has taken over silicon valley and is half the reason for much of the harm we are seeing. Serve a small number users really well, build all the infra to autoscale and let the organic growth happen more slowly. Get to a bigger critical mass and you'll eventually be able to take money on your own terms. If you can't do that, you haven't waited long enough, tried hard enough, or maybe your idea just isn't what you thought it was.
Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context.
> We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.
Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior.
Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.
And they're much more different than you might think. Lets be clear. Drug addiction is mediated either directly through effecting incentive salience via dopaminergic agonism, or, indirectly through glutamergic agonism as reward eventually training incentive salience. There's no need to actually enjoy the drugs, they just directly effect the reward prediction system and alter wanting and so behavior.
Very clear causation. Very clearly outside of human volition.
Now you have screens and sounds. Very clearly not effecting incentive salience directly. Very clearly not effecting glutamergic agonism (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) directly. The only mechanism of action would be through the person actually finding the experience enjoyable repeatedly and learning to anticipate this real enjoyment. Just normal human experience. No more 'addictive' and damaging to ones life than the random interval operant conditioning of recreational fishing, and probably much less expensive.
Very abstract causation with a very weak effect. Very clearly not ouside of human volition.
And, btw, gambling disorder was grandfathered in (there are no non-substance addictions in the DSM or ICD as your article highlights at the start). Repeated calls for, and instantiations of, working groups in the DSM and ICD have covered these 'media addictions' and found the medical support wanting over and over the last 20 years. Much like uncategorizable gambling disorder would be rejected if considered these days with modern medical standards and understandings. Most of the support for these concepts come from commercial groups that profit off "treatments". It's very similar to the "gay conversion camps" model in terms of political advocacy without scientific support. But the memes for "dopamine screens" and the like have raged like wildfire among the uninformed which gives such evil for-profit groups a seeming gleen of legitimacy they definitely do not have.
If it was not clear from me addresing the points of the linked paper above, I did read the Philosophical Transactions B paper (a very low tier journal for any biology subject). In this review paper they collect a random assortment of other studies to try to say gambling disorder people's brains are similar to drug addicted people. If you've read it (then I don't know why you linked it) but you'd know they come away with no solid conclusions beyond one: gambling disorder people often have drug problems too. This does not support your argument in this context.
Western capitalists have engineered addictions for 100s of years from forcing China to accept opium to introducing the taste of coffee to children to create demand for coffee in Japan in the future it's nothing new.
Now they are doing the same with technology.
The problem is capital. Of course many people are allergic to Marx, but the dude hit the nail on the head with his critique.
The problem is not individuals, it's a system of ownership over assets. And 99% of people will use their ownership to generate profits through hiring labor. Why? Because it's easier to have other people work for you, instead of you doing the work.
This becomes extended in the digital age beyond the original form of employees generating profit from the difference between their pay and the monetary value of their work (the original Marxist definition of profit), but also to end-users generating raw material as information for the further generation of profits through the selling of information services or plain data.
Tech has workers AND users in the formula for the generation of capital.
And if we, plebs, know this, you know the industry has already crafted their bourgeois science of this info extraction mechanism.
This monetary influence has already spread over the creation of hardware as well as software. This will follow in all of the tech-realms. They will influence the organizations that create the hardware and software specs. They will influence the law to ignore these ills. They are the creators of mass-use hardware and software.
The average end-user will live in a tech prison and the state is gonna become way more invasive. Democracy is on the line like it never has been before. They WILL use your instincts against you and they will use your data against you.
Just like capitalization has taken over every aspect of modern commodity/service production, and therefore modern life, so will data-capitalization.
There was never enshittification, it was just capital.
yep, good luck figuring out how to make a social media site that is engaging enough for people to keep coming back, able to pay its hosting bills, and just generally sustainable, without falling into the dark patterns.
If it can’t exist, should it? Or are we arguing about which color of unicorn would be the best?
In TFA… I guess he wants a government Unicorn, because surely there could be no issues with that and with strong regulation it will remain cool and competitive… everyone raves about how fucking awesome their water company is.
No matter how you slice and regulate it, the problem will always be there as long as its capitalism, which makes businesses exploit anything they operate upon.
This article thinks it's talking about problems with social media, but it's actually talking about problems with venture capitalism and economic inequality.
> Pure Intentions: Founders, like myself, genuinely want to connect people, share authentic moments, and build community. The early versions feel magical because they follow this original mission.
No. This idea that SC (or similar business cultures) want to change the world for the better is a cliche. At a certain point, after all the history of these companies, you don’t get a pure-intentions pass any more.
And in particular: I don’t believe that Zuckerberg’s motivations were ever good.
> Different Funding Methods: What if social platforms were funded like utilities or public goods instead of venture-backed and advertisement driven growth machines? Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics. Wikipedia thrives as a donation-funded cooperative. These models exist - they just don’t scale at venture-required rates.
This is good. You need to rethink the whole model. Even if that means that you don’t get to growth-hack people.
This is far better than the usual model:
1. Admit there’s a problem
2. It’s systemic
3. The fake solution: some feel-good manifesto about making X but “for humans”. But nothing about the incentives have been changed. The fundamental axiom is still there: we are entitled to make money off social media just like before, but we have a lot of words and paragraphs about doing so goodly.
The same thing happened with an attempt at making neoliberalism palpatable. “Stakeholder Capitalism”. The idea is that we just continue with neoliberalism but have a manifesto about how all stakeholders are taken into account. But nothing about the system or the power centers are changed. So you still get a corporations and their boards of directors having as much power as before.
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
I’m not sure. This seems like a half-measure. Regulating something which is inherently harmful (according to the simile) just causes more bloat.
If I’m addicted to nicotine I’m already hooked. No advertisement doesn’t help me. I already know what I want. You’re gonna make the packaging less sexy? Make me go into the Sin Section of the shop to get my fix? I’m gonna do that anyway.
What you need is an effective and mandatory opt-out option. Let me ban myself from buying these products. And provide me with alternatives (grocery shops already sell both tobacco and nicotine gum).
Give me an option to opt-out. Don’t just make a whole regulatory beast which can prey on me but one hundred checkboxes are marked and it’s very ethical and so on.
> Alternative Metrics: Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?
This would have been naive and just a loophole if the premise was to let companies keep doing their thing. They would just rebrand with fake metrics. Oh you have sent X messages this month, that means you are connecting and according to some research people who IM more are happier blah blah blah.
But this could have some merit given the previous utilities/public goods point.
> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.
I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse.
That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan."
I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. No one cares about them. It's all about fattening the company, and making it look good. When we do that, we'll feed it nothing but junk food, in an effort to make it as fat as possible, as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought as to long-term viability.
I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. It's still possible to make a decent living, but maybe not at the insane rates we see.
"The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality. Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up as common.
Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you. It's a very weird dynamic.
It helps to formally understand who is who. Every company has staff, customers, suppliers and product.
If you go the VC route then the VC is the customer. Since any good business is focused on customer satisfaction, a VC funded business is focused on VC satisfaction.
VCs want an exit. Which necessarily means switching funding model. The only switch that has worked so far is advertising. Advertising requires attention.
Of course a business can succeed with say SaaS subscriptions instead of advertising. This works well for B2B, but less so for B2C. Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B).
The pattern is now well understood, and well demonstrated. If your business is B2C then figure out the funding model. If you can't do that, if you can't do it without VC money, then your path is predestined.
> Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B).
Amazon still makes the most revenue from ecom.
But most of its profit from AWS
That's what you get when an expert financial trader makes a company. He wanted billions from the start ... so how to do it? There's only one way, really: a pyramid scheme. But an atypical one: get lots of sales, lots of revenue and change any profit into capital. This is quite a common plan in Western Europe, and that's why it doesn't work there.
Why would you do that? Well companies are taxed on profit. And the money you pay to investors ... is also paid out of the profit. No profit -> all the money stays in the company, under the control of management, ready to be deployed on yachts and castles for the CEO. Governments get nothing. Investors get nothing.
Jeff Bezos (and very early investors) get everything. If they get desperate there is a buyback (no doubt matched by a greater stock package for the top of the company).
This is a pyramid scheme because the whole company only works because it only makes extremely minimal profit. If it starts demanding profit it will be eaten alive by competition in no time at all. Money has to be invested in, flows to the top, and is taken out at the top. No doubt Bezos was utterly baffled by the success of it and therefore isn't yet out, but ...
> If it starts demanding profit it will be eaten alive by competition in no time at all.
At least until it becomes too big to fail and can build anticompetitive "moats" around itself to increase the amount of profit it can take.
For example, in the case of Amazon, they aren't just a retailer, they're a logistics and shipping company, too. And all of those are separate, itemized services that suppliers pay for, which increases revenue in a very opaque and difficult to understand way. On the customer's end that means higher prices and worse selection.
Any competitor to Amazon doesn't just have to get the same products for cheaper, they also have to build their own shipping company that can get products to people with <48hr turnaround. This provides a lot of room for Amazon to take a cut.
That being said, when you start building a giant business empire the direct profits matter less than the amount of control over the economy you get. In other words, you have the power to tax and subsidy, just like a government does. Amazon maintained minimal profit by deliberately subsidizing new business ventures until they could get big enough to become extractive on their own.
At no point does the business flip a switch and go from "deliberately burning money to avoid carrying a profit" to "extracting so much profit they get eaten by nimbler competition". They instead are always burning money, and always extracting, moving money to where they see fit.
> The company is the product.
If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.
Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.
Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.
Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).
Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).
A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality?
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.
A lot of the time I feel like the software economy is just a bunch of well-moneyed individuals betting on horses.
They are betting on whether richer people will bet on the same things so they can cash out. Repeat, all the way up.
The entire economy is to some degree a casino betting on itself. I think this is always true to an extent but the casino nature becomes much more dominant the more unbalanced things become.
I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat
You must not know many rich people if you think addiction is not an issue for the wealthy. The drugs of choice are less immediately destructive, but cocaine, pills, MDMA and ketamine are all wildly abused by the 1%.
All humans are susceptible to addictions and addictive behavior, but the 1% that you mention are mostly shielded from their negative effects. It's far less of an issue for them, and it's not even just about choosing the less destructive drugs. If we talk about just drug addictions, their wealth ensures that:
1. They always have a reliable supply of their preferred drug. No matter how much they need, many of them will be able to afford it pretty much indefinitely. They can just live with the addiction.
2. They have first-class healthcare to mitigate the addiction and lessen its side effects.
3. They have the power to never run into any legal trouble over it. How often do 1%s get convicted on drug possession? This often applies even to the harshest regimes.
So, referring to what the other commenter said, the wealth inequality also affects addicts unequally. The rich, excluding the most extreme exceptions, are immune to the downward spirals of addictions and many of their consequences. The poor addicts become increasingly desperate as their drug habit consumes most of their income and savings. The poorest turn to the cheapest, most dangerous street drugs. Many get little to no medical help. Many are charged with drug-related crimes, ensuring their criminality keeps them down for the rest of their lives. This varies by country, but the patterns are all similar.
There's always going to be an underlying layer of people who tend to gravitate towards addictions, rich and poor - the real question is if more and more people are turning to them as they get desperate, who wouldn't otherwise have.
That is a fundamentally different argument than the one GP was making.
Yeah, I agree, sorry. I went on a bit of a tangent, but still wanted to post it. But hey, I tried to bring it back in the last sentence.
Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.
Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering
the article is about digital addictions, and not gambling or drugs.
The point of saying it's complicated isn't to dismiss the problem, but to invite a deeper understanding of the problem itself so as to be better equiped to help solve the underlying issue, rather than show up, guns blazing, and then not actually fix anything.
Well maybe we can agree that addiction is a form of escapism, and the question then becomes why do people want to escape their current situations?
which you'll bring back to "in general, it's about wealth inequality", except that plenty of poor people aren't addicts.
> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
-H.L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken? You sure about that one?
though the wording is different, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/ says yes
> if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis...about your company, you will not succeed.
Halfway true. There's a famous quote:
> In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.
At some point, strong fundamentals will catch up with you.
In the short run if you can get acquired then the long run fundamentals don't matter. They just become noise in some larger company's financial statements.
This is such a boring dytopia. Everything is just a grift at this point.
They might not matter anymore for you, but they still exist, which is the sentiment the relevant sentiment for the quote.
In the limit that might be fine, the problem is the amount of damage caused in the meantime and the constraints that puts on future trajectories.
Only for those left holding the heavy, heavy bag.
> A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all in on "AI".
Capitalism as we know it so far only reacts after a crash happens because of the fear of crashing the economy with any corrective action. My very personal opinion is this is more psychological than scientific.
No, the reason is because these "crashes" are very small so on average you lose more trying to avoid them than just staying invested. The emotional part is trying to avoid them, the rational part isn't.
> Capitalism as we know it so far only reacts after a crash happens because of the fear of crashing the economy with any corrective action.
Inevitable when you tie the pension of people to the performance of the stonk markets.
> I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
As Action Jack Barker said, Pied Piper's product is its stock.
When you really think about it, this also applies to very many publicly traded companies. Tech especially, always searching to present next growth area. And then often shortly abandoning it or wasting massive resources on it...
Really does make me cynical on investing...
We make fun of the state run businesses of old communist regimes, how wasteful they were, how mismanaged they were, how they produced stuff nobody wanted and so on. I'm increasingly getting a similar feeling for VC fueled tech. It's all smoke and mirrors of hype (was blockchain or web3.0 yesterday, AI and quantum today). There is so much wasted money, especially after quantitative easing and negative interest rates of the past decade.
Publicly traded is no better. Lets not forget whole Meta and Metaverse and VR "investment". Google basically launching entire physical products and then killing them and refunding everyone (Stadia)...
One might question would we as society be better off if that money was spend on more efficient factories or say nuclear powerplants?
How about public education and healthcare?
The difference is that VC fueled startups is a very small part of the economy while communist regimes are the entire economy.
Imagine if every company was as wasteful as VC fueled startups and life would be hell, imagine going to the new smart grocery store where prices changes by the minute and now you have surge pricing since many wanted to buy toilet paper this minute...
Most companies are wasteful. Perhaps not as wasteful as a startup, but still incredibly wasteful, and it scales non-linearly with size.
They may be a small part of the economy as measured in imaginary numbers being shifted around but still have a significant negative effect on our lives that cannot be easily escaped. This is even more true when you also count publicly traded companies which have similar incentives to sell out their "customers" in order to benefit the real customers and are often just the final form of VC funded startups.
Companies do this because growth is often possible. failed investments are the cost of growth. Overall, the returns are positive.
Is it growth itself you are opposed to?
> I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. I
How do you force an industry to ignore profit incentive? Seems a little pollyannish to hope for.
You force them to pay for the negative externalities they cause so that their profit incentives are not as misaligned with what is good for the rest of the world. This includes making companies pay for pollution but also for much more abstract damages like the reduced consumer choice from monopolies.
> You force them to pay for the negative externalities they cause
Surely Capital would just purchase more convenient terms from politicians.
To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
The idea that executives have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a trope from business ethics class, not law.
I say this because you used the phrase "fiduciary duty" which does not exist in this context.
> from business ethics class, not law
Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is long before Milton Friedman began advocating that corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is itself a long strange story.
The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common shareholders get from the corporation only what is their privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter. There are now, and have been in the past, many different kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example, some big corporations today have many common shareholders who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting them various interests in the corporation, is that the common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation, as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by other persons, and owns itself.
It’s incredible how many people don’t understand this. Google is an obvious example that has multiple classes of stock and only some are voting shares.
There is the “shareholder lawsuit” but that really is about enforcing a company’s stated goals to its shareholders, which can and often are things other than “try to make the stock price go up as much as possible”.
I am repeatedly entertained by the phenomenon of someone who reads a case, bothers to remember it, thinks it's important, describes it, but does not provide a citation.
Friedman deeply misunderstands agency law. Saying he got the lawyers behind him is misleading, because there are any corporate fiduciary duties owed by directors or officers to the shareholder other than 1) act informed 2) do not usurp corporate opportunity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
This is not statute, but it remains legally binding in Delaware so long as the courts uphold it.
It's not legally required in the state of Delaware (or Michigan where Dodge v Ford occured) to _maximize_ shareholder value.
It's that if you're going to make a decision that affects 1/3 of the companies value you need to actually claim it's in the shareholders interest that you do so.
I don't think maximization of shareholder value is really the interesting part, it's the mandate that they must be prioritized ahead of employees and customers.
> It's that if you're going to make a decision that affects 1/3 of the companies value you need to actually claim it's in the shareholders interest that you do so.
I'm not really sure where the 1/3rd ratio came from. Can you explain? To my layman's ear, "value" and "shareholder value" are the exact same thing.
> I don't think maximization of shareholder value is really the interesting part, it's the mandate that they must be prioritized ahead of employees and customers.
The problem is that Ford didn't try to claim that the factory was in the shareholder's best interest.
> I'm not really sure where the 1/3rd ratio came from. Can you explain? To my layman's ear, "value" and "shareholder value" are the exact same thing.
Nothing special about 1/3. It's the value of the dividend (19 M) / value of Ford (60 M). If you're going to spend 1/3 of the company on something you better at least claim it's in the company / shareholder's best interest.
---
To quote the wikipedia article
> Under some interpretations, the case also affirmed that the business judgment rule that directors may exercise is expansive, leaving Ford and other businesses a wide latitude about how to run the company, if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
And then to emphasis: "if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole."
Correct, because GP said “legal obligation," which I agree: there isn't one.
Genuine question because I think I might be wrong on this one, or maybe misunderstanding what you're saying - aren't there cases of shareholders suing CEOs for not acting in shareholders interest and winning? If there was no legal obligation to act on behalf of shareholders how could they win those cases?
My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being sued if they actually have the money to make it worth suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse affect on their deal flow
Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand for something real but very complex.
I think Matt Levine coined this phrase: "everything is securities fraud."
Activist investors will sue for anything alleging that executives broke securities law by doing anything that harmed their portfolio. It doesn't mean they win the cases, or that anyone is guilty.
There's also something worth noting that even if there isn't a legal obligation for executives to act on their shareholders interests, they have a really strong incentive when their compensation is mostly stock grants and the shareholders can fire them.
As far as I know, no there has not been a CEO successfully sued in the US for failing to maximize shareholder value.
Board not CEO but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon_duties
For CEO see https://www.rgrdlaw.com/cases-in-re-dole-food-co-inc-stockho...
The first paragraph from the first source:
> The Court declared that, in certain limited circumstances indicating that the "sale" or "break-up" of the company is inevitable, the fiduciary obligation of the directors of a target corporation are narrowed significantly, the singular responsibility of the board being to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available.
Seems to imply that under normal operation (i.e. no inevitable break-up) the fiduciary obligations are quite different though?
Yes, under normal circumstances, the "business judgment rule" applies which is much more favorable to boards. Satisfying it requires only that directors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule#Standar...I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.
If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea.
That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
Edit: To say: I voted with my feet and moved to a place which better aligns with my values. From a "common good" society to a "freedom" society.
One small question: how did those places manage to change the economic system for the entire population?
Usually extremely violent revolt
I don't think the appetite is there in most places
I'm not sure this is true. My analysis shows that 75% of economic transitions are completed without violent revolt.
Just a quick glance at the 44 historic economic transitions in my dataset, most of them aren't well known. The most likely reason why we think economic revolutions are associated with violent revolt is due to selection bias - violent revolts are more memorable, take up a larger section of history books, etc.
Happy to take at look at your dataset and compare notes.
Many EU countries are pretty nice places to live, and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen. All it took was democracy, a population willing to stand for its rights, and an elite which understood that building a welfare state is preferable outcome over having a violent Communist/Fascist revolution.
A capitalist system with right amount of social democracy to prevent worst concentration of wealth is the best model there is, at least for the well-being of its citizen and survival of its democracy.
> a population willing to stand for its rights
"Stand for it's rights" is just weasel words for "Was willing to use violence in order to obtain their rights"
Even if they never actually had to become violent, violence or the credible threat of violence is the only thing that has ever in history convinced "The Elites" to change things
>and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen
You really need to read more history about Europe.
There was no such revolt in the country where I live, and in many others. Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system, with democracy you can change the economic system without a revolution.
> Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system
I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
Democracy came later
> It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
It did create democracy, the French Republic, Napoleon did end that though but its much easier to reinstate democracy later than to create it from scratch.
> I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
Revolutions to loot the rich happened a lot throughout history, but here the explicit goal was to end monarchy and create democracy not just looting the rich, that is a big difference.
I think the majority of European countries had a violent revolution. And the German invasion of many neighboring nations had the same characteristics, they were welcomed with their new world order by the populace in many places.
The war in general ushered in new economic systems.
Most famously they did it by a "great leap".
Can you explain how that model isn't generalizable while avoiding describing the consequences? I want to know why it can't work not how it fails.
After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
There's no general way to model, only empirical evidence. Unless I'm supposed to enter the mind and soul of people and see their motives and reasoning.
But I'll give a one word answer: pride.
Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population.
>To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population
It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism.
Common good happens at the grass roots level and then spreads by consensus. Doesnt mean it will happen on a large scale, esp if there are larger forces at work.
It seems like this is a population size problem to me. Or at least a concentration of large populations in a small area (Cities). Maybe the trick is to spread out the population a bit more and prevent areas from becoming over populated somehow.
I don't have the data in front of me right now, but there are some sources that say when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
Thus this creates social circles that try to gain power for powers sake and do not contribute to society.
> when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
You may be interested in this essay from the feminist movement in the 60s: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm. It describes how the lack of structure or process forces the group to be run primarily by social dynamics like friendship, charm and influence.
There are lots of effects that happen as groups scale. But this capture of consensus-based and flat groups by ego-centric charismatic members happens in even tiny groups.
That's why successful flat groups (e.g. parliaments) have structure (e.g. Robert's rules) and make decisions by majority vote rather than consensus.
Yeah I can see some truth in this. Structure and processes help us deal with this problem. And my experience has been that structures and process get corrupted, kind of like what has happens in or political systems over the years.
IMHO, it seems like it easier to deal with ego when the groups are smaller. When they get too large, we tend to use bureaucracies to manage decision making logistics. Bureaucracies make it easier for people that want power over others to hide.
> After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
What do you mean by exterminate large swatches of the population in Scandinavia? Yes the way the Sumi have (and to a degree still are) been treated is atrocious, but I'd argue that if anything this is not a feature of creating a "common good" society. I would argue that strongly capitalistic/mercetalistic societies have a horrible track record of treating (and still treat) indigenous populations.
They're called Sami, and I don't think they've been treated much worse than any other ethnicity in Nordic countries.
What I'm referring to are the eugenics programs in Sweden, where unfit people were sterilized and/or had their children taken from them. These kind of programs were also present in North America, for what it's worth. The complete extent of these programs will probably forever be unknown, in all countries. Scandinavian countries are probably the countries who are most open about this, just like with suicide reporting.
As for Finland, they had a communist revolution and a very brutal civil war about the same time as the Russians. So their "common good" society was also born from a bloodbath, although the communists lost the war.
Norway is probably an exception. They're building a "common good" society on oil fortunes, just like the Gulf states have no problem with giving generous welfare for all of their citizens.
Please name a few such places
Off the top of my head, Costa Rica, Bhutan, Canada, Norway/Sweden?
A good read: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/costa-rica-enli...
Switzerland... the best actually long term sustainable and working capitalism I've seen.
All freedom US craves so much for (and much more) while stronger social state than next to nothing US has for its weaker part of society
Switzerland is not a good place for working moms. It is a very conservative country, for example working moms are systematically discriminated. The society, police, insurance, and banks enforce a conformity to a conservative, male-dominated society.
https://www.businessinsider.com/female-breadwinner-moved-swi...
Any communist country of your preference.
> If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.
Absolutely and me too. And that's why neither of us are actually CEO of anything (I assume)
I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings.
At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment in time.
Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
One of humans' needs is for status which is by definition zero sum. Same with mating.
If anything those two are probably the most important needs so it's not possible to build such a system.
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
> We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Those aren't very productive, our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status. Older systems people destroyed value for others in that chase, creating wars or other miseries, we have much less of that today.
I'd much rather have another billionaire than another authoritarian warmongering dictator.
> our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status
I don't think most of the people who have extremely high status are doing anything remotely close to producing value
They just own capital which they use to pay other people to produce value, which they then take credit for, which boosts their status
So it would seem that we're pretty divorced from the idea of "produce value -> get status" these days, if you can just pay people to produce value for you instead
Billionaires are the warlords of the 21st century. The only difference is that we've switched the map. We don't compete on the land, we compete on economic territory. But the results are the same - they fill the same role.
Expansionism, cult of followers, dispensing boons, and absolute control over their territory? check. The only reason we don't recognize them as warlords is because they don't wave scimitars and wear turbans. Neolibrral warlords wear Patagonia vests and beige slacks.
We're terrible at mistaking asthetics for function. Fortresses have been replaced by platforms; trade routes replaced by data sharing agreements. Armies have been ursurped by legal teams and lobbyists. We barely escaped feudalism and it's not clear we're out of the orbit of neo feudalism.
If we're able to be honest with ourselves, we need to learn that asthetics and function are different things. Just because they look different doesn't mean they don't fulfill the same function.
Prove a need for status before building systems of oppression to meet it.
If it's zero sum you can design a system where everyone gets three sane amount. That's what strict monogamy does for mating, and you can easily imagine some "everyone is equal" communism-like system.
In practice that doesn't work, and the most successful "common good" systems instead ensure the disparity is limited and access is as equal as possible (e.g. not everyone can be wealthy, but the wealthy are not too rich and anyone had a chance to become rich instead of needing rich parents; or everyone can only have one married partner at a time instead of people who can afford it amassing big harems and not leaving any partners for the rest; or anyone can become famous, and famous people pushing their kids into fame is looked down on)
Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources.
At one extreme you get theories like communism or socialism that treat humans as disposable cattle to be murdered or starved when they stand in the way of whatever the party leaders decide is the common good.
The common good is something that has to be worked out deliberatively and is more like taking the resultant of a huge number of force vectors than it is like mass producing units of the same good for everyone.
> Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources.
Would you cite sources for this claim?
The word "Common Good" has a specific meaning. It steams from the word "Common" which means the people that share common values at our most basic levels, and "Good" means whats best for the people that share these common values.
What you are talking about is imposed self-interest at the level of the population from one or a small population that do not represent the common good. Not the same thing IMHO.
That's not what common good is. Common good never requires that people share core values.
Common good historically was what's good for the city/polis/country/band/family. Basically, you make some (ideally relatively small) sacrifice to your own interest for the sake of a larger group you share fate with.
There are more formal/mathematical versions of it, for example in Bentham where the common good is essentially a weighted sum over the good to each individual. Rousseau described it almost exactly as the resultant of force vectors. There are more authoritarian versions like in historical Sparta and more recently in Marx and Engels where it's imposed through violence.
> imposed self-interest
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but self-interest is almost by definition not externally imposed. In Marxism one particular vision of the common good is imposed externally via a "revolutionary terror."
Here is the etymology of the word:
common(adj.)
c. 1300, "belonging to all, owned or used jointly, general, of a public nature or character," from Old French comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Modern French commun), from Latin communis "in common, public, shared by all or many; general, not specific; familiar, not pretentious." This is from a reconstructed PIE compound ko-moin-i- "held in common," compound adjective formed from ko- "together" + moi-n-, suffixed form of root mei- (1) "to change, go, move," hence literally "shared by all."
Your confusing political language with what came before this. Common good is the will of the people. It has nothing to do with cities, countries, or states. All of those things were created by people that wield political power. This is not the same as the common good. Common good directly relates to what is good for the people that share common values. You have been misinformed, by political society unfortunately.
The idea of common good is centuries older than the appearance of French or the English translation.
It has nothing to do with shared values. It's exactly as I described it above.
Notice the reconstructed PIE means to move together. Common good is about the interests of groups that co-move rather than groups that share values.
This makes sense even in family contexts. What is good for the family is often different from what any one person wants. Think about things like choosing dinner for a big hungry family on a long road trip.
Often the best solution is at best everyone's third or fourth choice because values and desires differ.
So "Common Good" is directly related to "Common Law" which showed up in 509-27 BC Rome during the Republic period and it was a way to have a common understanding between the "Common People" when Rome's political state was trying to use political law against non-Romans. The common people needed a way to protect themselves from the rising emperors and their decrees.
So I understand that you think its about families, but in this context, its really not. It was a way or a method to protect commoners.
When I say value, I mean if we both value freedom then we have a "Shared Value". This is really about the rights of the people which differs what rulers, want for the people. And I mean rulers that want to wield power against the people, for self-interested purposes.
Again that is not what common good is and it does not originate in the Roman Republic.
I'm honestly not sure it's worth responding here or what you're trying to say about Rome. It sounds like you may be confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, which started much later in 31 BCE. For one thing the Roman Republic did not have an emporer. For another it wasn't expanding militarily or ruling non-Romans.
And you also seem to be confusing different uses of "common".
Common generally means something held collectively by a group. By extension it can mean "customary" as in common law rather than statutory law. By extension it also can mean "ordinary" or "plain", as in "common house cat". "Commoners" or "common people" are just "ordinary" people; that is, people without titles.
The only connection between the "common" in "common good" and "common people" is the use of the string "common". The word means different things in the two contexts.
Rome most certainly was expanding militarily and ruling non romans far before it became an empire. The punic wars for example were more than a century before it became an empire.
No the original meaning of "Common Good" is related to "Common Law" And that actually originated in Rome between the Republic and Empire periods. Your focus on the specific dates have nothing to do with the actual originating use of the saying.
It can mean "ordinary" or "plain", but not in the context of "Common Good". I think you are trying to obfuscate the meaning by focusing on the peripherals of the context.
And avoiding orienting around needs makes all of us susceptible to desires & values we've larvely been indoctrinated into.
Yeah I am not sure what you mean by this, see my reply above.
I don't think quoting the dictionary is helping here.
The problem with common good is that it's hard to agree upon what is good, and if you find a good, there's often a group that's outside this "common".
In this context, I disagree. Its really clear what the good in "Common" means.
Its like principles of what the Constitution was written on. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Principles like these are qualities we all naturally exhibit and as such doesn't need any explanation or qualifications. I know in our modern world people have decided that everything is open to interpretation. But I believe this was indoctrinated into us, over a long period of time, not to consider the human value[0] aspect of our being that we are born with. This was done by watering down the direct meaning of words and slowly changing the perception that humanity doesn't have infinite value and has to rely on external power structures to give it meaning.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/end-of-all-evil/page/n1/mode/2up
Over human history the best system we have come up with and implemented to ensure this has been capitalism. Nothing else has come close
This is capitalist mythology. You'll need to account for "best" here because millions of people under the thumb of large-scale genocide, such as the policy decisions to implement poverty (which capitalism requires), likely have something to say about what you think is "best".
Can you present me with an alternative that was implemented, ran for a significant period of time and resulted in a better quality of life for those under it? Also poverty is not genocide, if you are going to present an argument please make it factual. You insult victims of actual genocide and minimize what they have endured with this comparison.
I didn’t say perfect, i said best.
I'm going by how people in the global majority, victims of imposed poverty by empires through debt slavery, who also experience OTHER forms of genocide & recognize poverty for the genocide it is.
Check out the quality of life of the Aka, Baka, and Mbuti tribes. They're genetically and culturally linked to a mother tribe 150k years ago.
So a culture has kept these people going for 150k years. Capitalism has no such capability.
Collaboration, spontaneous improvisation, counterdominant play/decision making/protection, egalitarian, matrifocality, immediate return. Those are values that flourish in an infinite game theoretically and in real life. We just have been taught so many backwards ideas these ideas seem foreign & barely recognizable.
Friend you are comparing civilizations that support hundreds of millions of people to small tribes of pygmies that total maybe 30k people and survive on hunting and gathering. Additionally they only exist in little groups of 50 to a few hundred individuals. How do you see billions of people surviving as hunter gatherers? Or do you forsee the need to cull 95% of humanity? This is not a realistic comparison friend and you know that. The only system that can keep hundreds of millions or billions of people fed and housed is capitalism.
Friend, go run the simulations at scale and get back to me before you keep peddling the religious belief that capitalism is the only way to feed billions.
You have no idea how to scale up collaboration due to separation from indigenous cultures that were praxised for tens of thousands of years & cultivated food forests across America without price tags.
I am sure you know this due to your extensive research and simulations but the average life span of the tribes you mentioned is in the low 20s... Some of your examples are even less than that.
Only 40% of the Aka and Mbuti actually survive to age 15 or greater
I look forward to you explaining how this is actually a good thing. Because currently it looks like your argument is that the 9 billion people on earth should adopt the life style of tiny groups of hunter gatherers that for the most part don't make it out of childhood and those that do generally die in their early 20s or younger.
For reference, the average lifespan in the United States is 77, so more than 3x, approaching 4x. Per your prior arguments, this is a genocide...
Not really - in practice on paper capitalistic countries need tons of socialist policies in order to prevent the system from eating the people it depends on.
Great! You've convinced nobody of anything.
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
You can explicitly build the business to say "delivering shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must remember that we live in a society and upon a planet".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
>But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
I see little evidence that this is true. If anything, modern VC companies are "externality parasites". They produce positive externalities for some (ie. shareholders), by putting a lot of negative externalities on society as a whole (see for example the cost to democracy, societal cohesion, etc. that comes for Facebook and the like).
Their purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing all sorts of heinous things
You should read a history book about why corporations were invented and allowed to exist.
There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
And businesses as a whole produce positive externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to allow them to exist.
Only when accounting is done without calculating ecological cost, including human quality of life.
Human quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.
> we continue to allow them to exist
Who is “we”? I can’t do anything about it. No more than peasants “allow” the king to exist..
Sure you can. You can vote to get rid of corporations, and you'll get outvoted. Ergo: we.
You don't understand how kings work if you think it's equivalent to your situation in a western democracy.
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Formatting issue?
"Voting obviously doesn't work." - Troll
Voting obviously works, you can vote away capitalism, some countries did that.
The only reason it "doesn't work" is that the countries that did vote away capitalism didn't fare very well, so other countries people are very reluctant to try that again. But they absolutely could if they wanted.
Some countries “voted” to elect Putin and napoleon too…
> The purpose of a system is what it does
This is a dumb saying. And if you start to apply it to everything capitalism still seems pretty ok. For example: "The purpose of Communism is killing 20+ million people"[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Sovi...
I agree that when taken literally, it's a dumb thing to say: literally (i.e., the dictionary definition), the purpose of a system is the reason why it was built, not what it does. But it's a slogan, and slogans don't always make sense taken literally. The point of the slogan is to remind people of the (obvious, I hope) fact that, as I wrote:
> you can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it
If you check my Wikipedia link it shows that the original quote says more or less the same thing: "[this slogan] makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances".
In other words, it doesn't matter what's the historical context of why corporations were created, what matters is what they do now. You can argue, like it was argued, that corporations as a whole currently are a net benefit. My point is that bringing up the historical context of their original purpose adds nothing to the discussion.
As to your other point, I completely agree that it would be useless to try to defend the Staling regime by pointing out what communism was intended to be. That's more or less the point I was trying to make.
That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.
I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all.
Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say).
In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.
Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty worldwide by an order of magnitude than any other competing system or ideology.
What capitalism does is apparent in its worldwide success.
Amazed that Hacker News has become such a bastion of socialism. The above comment is objective fact.
It’s pretty rare for businesses to produce positive externalities. Businesses create value and some of that value goes to others, but that normally happens through explicit transactions.
Yes, I've heard the party line too. The difference is, I realized it was horseshit.
Even better idea is not to have shareholders. After all there are millions of business running without external shareholders.
Or to remove limited liability from shareholders.
The only way to make that happen is to have that common good be priced into the shareholder value, i.e., removing externalities that allow the privatization of profit and the public subsidies of the remediation of the damage done.
Easy peasy, no?
Then don't make a company with shares. This is like complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play football. Anybody who makes his business a company with shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any activity, which isn't structured in this way.
1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone. 2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it. 3. Nobody forces you to watch Netflix.
We all choose what we do in life.
#1 is rapidly approaching the practicality of “nobody forces you to have money.” Technically true but deeply impractical.
#2 is heading that way. Lots of official info is only available on social media. Travel to certain countries can be difficult if you don’t have any social media presence as they’ll decide you’re trying to hide something.
1 and 2 are simply false
#1, I’m forced to file taxes and use 2FA to log in to do so.
#2, I have to use SM for marketing.
To avoid these I’d need to basically be a homeless vagrant.
There are billions of people in the world who don't need to market on social media to survive. Are you genetically different from them?
Would you put your money into a business which put common good above your return on investment?
Would you give to charity? You are pointing at the heart of the prisoner's dilemma endlessly recreated by the very existence of capital: why choose long-term public benefit over a short-term personal gain?
People give to charity what they don't need. If all businesses are expected to be charities, they cease to be profitable and thus cease to function, as no one will bankroll the initial investment required to set up a business without the prospect of making money on it.
Let's look at an example. In order to produce e.g. wind turbines, a large factory is needed, full of expensive machines. Let's assume that the buldings plus the machines all costs $500 million altogether. Where would that $500m come from, if the factory will never be profitable, so entities with money will never bankroll it? The only alternative I can think of is 100% socialism and centrally managed economy, where all businesses are owned and bankrolled by the state. However, in practice all such implementations so far (over probably at least a dozen different countries) has been terribly inefficient and corrupt.
It’s a question of time horizon.
...go on.
I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with what creates common good - IE policy is like game design where you design the rules in a way that provides an overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.
There is no latitude. They have only one requirement: growth growth growth.
If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will throw money at you to supercharge it.
If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will chase the growth at all means
Your board firing you is not a "legal obligation".
So you don’t get sued, but you lose control or even your stake or even the whole business. Remember how Uber founder got kicked out? He had a strong hand.
Chilling effect is there one way or another, and even when that does not work adverse selection does.
You have to have a very strong market position to resist the investor pressure. Kinda like Google had twenty years ago.
Or you can have a diverse set of investors who can’t or won’t be swayed by activist investors. But that usually means being public at which point your employees are incentivized by RSUs.
I'm not arguing there isn't an incentive problem. I'm arguing that it doesn't have any basis in statute. The distinction is important because it points to a different solution and different moral culpability for the system's outcomes.
The funding is raised to chase growth, otherwise no VC will ever give money.
If you get the money and then try to U-turn and refuse to chase growth, the board will start asking questions
The legal obligation is that CEO does whatever board tells him to, otherwise board can fire ceo
This still does not produce any legal obligation.
Ok but you’ve lost your mission, your tools to accomplish that mission, and effectively your company.
Yeah, but you not getting what you want, you not having own little imperium is not the same as "you having legal obligation".
This amounts to an argument that if doing something immoral gives you money and power, you can not possibly say no and no one can blame you. That somehow more money and power is good enough excuse.
Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too much.
In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such.
In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.
Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't think that's even a real factor here.
It’s also survivorship bias. Given that a start up has explosive growth, it way more likely that they are amoral.
The ones who play the game with integrity and morals never have the type of growth that makes headlines. But I’m sure they exist.
That really doesn't follow. Explosive growth guarantees amorality? What sin is inherit to success? Has envy become so embedded in our thinking that success alone is proof of guilt? Or is it just Original Sin style bullshit where everone is automatically guilty?
Far from guaranteed, but to be a moral founder you now have a second goal alongside growth. Inevitably the two will be in conflict.
Didn’t say guaranteed, I said more likely.
To succeed, you have to execute many things well and avoid bad luck. Add to this an extra constraint that one also needs integrity or morals and it will drastically reduce your success rate.
My statement will be true as long as having integrity or morals could hinder growth in some way.
100% agreed, well put
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if you deviate from the current standard behavior.
We’ve all seen companies do layoffs just because “Wall Street” was concerned about the economy and then instantly see the stock price spike up.
These negative consequences are all results of bog standard prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
Maybe in theory, but in practice there is a strong power mismatch that causes investors to have a strong influence. Sand Hill learned it's lesson from Facebook/Zuckerberg and now always have a seat on the board. Only outliers like zuck/bezos/similar have the weight to push back against investors. Heck, even Dorsey couldn't for whatever reason.
And even if what you said is true, you can look at the results of years of this system, the difference between companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong case against what you're saying.
It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be replaced by people who are willing to do what the board wants.
The difference between getting fired and getting convicted of a crime is pretty important, actually!
The annoying tone is unnecessary. Yes, legally speaking operators can go against the board and get replaced, which they certainly should do if they feel they're being asked to do something unethical. But it's not going to change how the company is run.
For the executive, sure. Not for the impact of the overall incentive structure on the trajectory of the business. Which is what this discussion is about.
The discussion literally said "legal obligation."
That's what I was responding to.
The root comment this thread is in reply to had the implication that people are only acting this way because of an inaccurate idea of how strict the legal obligations are, and the other comments are about how that’s obviously not the only force producing the current outcome
Yeah, obviously that's not "the only force producing this outcome." Nobody claimed it was.
But it's important for founders to understand they are not legally obligated to do any specific thing for their shareholders. It is their responsibility to act morally. Yes, there are other incentives and forces at play. "Legal obligation" is not the cop-out excuse that executives claim it is.
On that level, on the quasi-feudal economy that is taking over the world, it's not clear which of those is more impactful.
Even focusing on short term profit would be fine, if you want to blow up the business go ahead, if those profits were actually shared fairly with shareholders. Too often companies can just dilute their stock over and over, which fucks over individual investors and benefits the 51% owners, and investors don't really get a say, yes there's a vote but if 51% is owned by a few it's not a vote.
Individual investors are largely operating on trust.
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> The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality
This "legal obligation" is an internet rumor that does not exist in the real world. Yes, if your company has competing buyout offers of $1m and $2m and the board takes the $1m offer because they received a bribe, it will come up. Otherwise, it never does.
The proof is in the pudding (please go find me even one case where shareholders have successfully imposed their will on a board or executives because of this obligation), but it doesn't even logically make sense. Other than the buyout example, it's hard to think of almost any action a company could take that doesn't have some justification that it is for the benefit of shareholders. i.e. if we make our app too addictive, we risk social backlash and regulatory intervention by governments which will hurt out shareholders. And that's all that is needed, because there is no associated time frame with this obligation.
To be clear, boards and executives might strive to please investors, but it is not based on a legal obligation. An executive that ignores the interests of shareholders might be concerned about their reputation as a capable entrepreneur, risk losing their job, or devalue their own shares, but they are no in legal jeopardy.
Just because the risk of getting successfully sued for making decisions against the interests of shareholders is low, it doesn't mean that it won't influence executive decision making. CEOs want to avoid legal risks above all else and thus the laws around fiduciary duty can have a chilling effect even if judges generally go along with the CEO's interpretation of what is in the interest of shareholders.
It’s not low, it’s zero. There are literally no successful cases ever except the buyout scenario already mentioned.
Find me a serious lawyer anywhere that says this is a legitimate concern.
I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded and continue to erode.
Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter"
Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or your society will destroy itself.
> Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore.
I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about. Something small could just stay small because none of the big players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by someone else going the VC route before the small company could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs. VC-backed.
Another reason is optimization for profit, combined with competition making it a survival necessity to do this.
Early in a nascent industry, you focus on the core product. You bring scale and scope economies. You make the supply chain more efficient. You improve the logistics. More abundant basic food stuffs for everyone, and more profits for agriculture shareholders. A true win-win.
Later on when the industry matures, the easy wins are all gone. Logistics and agriculture is fully optimized. The only scope for improvement is in marketing, adding sweeteners, and cutting out expensive ingredients. Now it's a lose-win, but from the shareholders perspective only, it's a win.
The problem is, you can't just ask companies to act nicely. While that would be a good start, even if they genuinely wanted to, competition largely forces their hand. The solution is careful and minimal regulation, to deter the pathological late-stage optimizations.
This is what always frustrates me: why do companies need to bother with "pathological late stage optimisations" at all, if not for perverse incentives in the fundamental economic and political structure of how companies operate? Why is reaching a growth plateau perceived as stagnation instead of success? Why must a company feel pressured to grow forever, without bound? What's wrong with building a business to sustainability and equilibrium? Why does this almost never happen? Why do we instead see enshittification literally EVERYWHERE?
Cause some sociopath name Friedman wrote something that the ruling class/ generationally wealthy loved. That business should only serve the owner to the expense of literally everything else.
Since the rich and powerful get what they want. This race to the bottom mentality has saturated anything where a company accepts outside investment. This means any public company and any investment into the company outside of a bank loan. Which is basically every company nowdays since private equity company have bought stake in literally almost everything.
> Stanford Prison Experiment
Just a heads up, the experiment was complete fraud and could never be replicated.[1]
I agree with you that outside investment can work as a strong accelerator for these things. It enables founders to externalize responsibility.
However, it is not the main reason. Exploitative companies have existed long before venture capital was invented. In the end every company exists to make money and so is inherently immoral. That is why the state is needed to regulate the market so companies don't hurt society too much.
Those founders didn't get corrupted by evil venture capital, they didn't have that strong of a morality to begin with.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...
The investors don’t care about the morals of the company; they just want a higher valuation so they can flip it for a profit.
Either with a guy promising Mars while siegheiling or jeopardizing teens’ health or ruining the Earth. All that matters is the valuation.
And why not? Investors never get into trouble for the mess their investments cause. Worst-case scenario, they lose their investment.
It's incredibly simple, but it's also true
Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome - Charlie Munger
It's the same with politics and money.
We don't get the leaders we want, because it costs money to buy people's attention. We get the people who have some way to pay for attention
(in recent years, one of those ways is increasingly corruption - e.g. senator of NJ, mayor of NY, etc.)
An article today talks about Cuomo following the "local TV buys" playbook, which WAS a fairly reliable way to win elections:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
That didn't work this time, but the mechanism is simple and clear
> "local TV buys" playbook
Who watches local TV anymore? Probably not many people under 60.
The linked article is questioning why the Democratic powers-that-be thought that
A lot of people. Especially older people who go out and vote.
I think the VC thing is indicative of the entire thing; the goal is profit and everything is subordinated to that. This is how the system works and how it is designed to work. When profit and some external thing like social responsibility are at odds, profit is going to win out every time. The mercenary mentality rules the scene.
In Magickal Faerieland, we have regulations to align those 2 things by incentivizing the "goodguy" path and/or disincentivizing the "cackling villain" path but we live in reality where money rules and regulatory capture is a thing. So a Facebook or other megacorp can get away with using neuroscience and psychology to engineer a virtual slot machine with a terrible payout and ExxonMobile et al can get away with being an architect of environmental degradation and the accompanying humanitarian disasters.
I wrote a couple pieces about how to take back control of your brain:
https://open.substack.com/pub/vonnik/p/how-to-take-your-brai...
Yes, the addictions are engineered in the service of shareholder value. There are many ways to fight it!
Fwiw, this dynamic goes way beyond VC and tech.
Douglas Courtwright writes about this in Age of Addiction:
https://www.amazon.com/The-Age-of-Addiction-audiobook/dp/B07...
Of course VC loan sharking is a major part of the problem. But it's also tiring reading blog after blog of people who say they want to do the right things and do them right or whatever the trendy thing is that month, all as a thinly veiled pretence to get as much funding from whoever wants to give it to them and try to make themselves the next Zuckerberg or Bezos.
If people actually believed in something they'd make it open source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of advertising.
Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:
If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.
So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.
I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
I think Europe is moving g toward digital independence even more. They've still got Instagram and WhatsApp and everything, but I can see them moving more aggressively toward Facebooks core business model (ie, programmatic adverising) and essentially creating a European internet bubble. Would be nice for Europeans to be able to have their own social media sites which operate less aggressively on your attention span - like Facebook circa 2009 or even MySpace. Chronological feeds, less invasive advertising practices.
We are building a social network with chronological feed.
I am thinking how to make it sustainable without raising VC funding but not doing aggressive ad targeting. Obviously people are not going to pay for a social network. So maybe just very generic sponsered links?
Maybe the model should be more like public roads - for-profit companies are involved in building parts of them but they don't control the whole system.
Could do what redsit does and offer programmatic advertising targeted based on subreddits
Yeah.. simple keyword matching might work.
But one for the rare case of ours taking off
> I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
Gross.
Yes. But what’s the alternative?
Integrity.
Its not just shareholders, stock based equity also has all the employees pushing profit.
Engineering addiction is also probably more often than not intentional. When all the business metrics/KPIs are stuff like "engagement time", "$ spent", even AB testing of random features leads to manufacturing addiction
Well, yes. Encouraging people to avoid Marxism and all the successive schools of thought has done irreparable damage to this country (and likely the entire west). And I'm not even dogmatic about this: you can read Schumpeter, the father of VC, to reach the same conclusion. Private investment will eat the world and our childrens' lives, even at the cost of self-preservation.
Reductionism is fine when a supermajority of available data paints the same picture, and that's what's happening here.
* Founders aren't trying to solve a problem, they're trying to grab table scraps from VCs and the already-wealthy to try and save their own skins. As a result, it's all about exit strategy, growth, and moat instead of business fundamentals and customer experience.
* VCs and their wealthy backers aren't looking for good business, they're looking for good profit. It's why they'll gladly invest into slop or outright grifts, and why they demand anything they invest into have an exit strategy (i.e., IPO) planned so they can cash out before the company collapses.
* Talent who wants to build a long-term career with a company - and accordingly focus on fixing its flaws, improving the customer experience, and saving expenditures - can't, because companies no longer fundamentally exist to provide long-term solutions and products, only short-term growth YoY. This ultimately ends up harming output and innovation, because why bother giving it your all when such efforts are counter to the "explosive growth" narrative and likely to get you PIPed?
* Retail investors and Business News are left feeding a monster that runs on Fairy Tales and ignorance, promoting big gains and huge losses rather than actual investing advice or corporate accountability.
It's all just a disgusting grift, is what I'm reducing it to, and I can't really fault Founders either since they're just trying to strike gold in an emptying mine shaft before it's closed off or collapses in. They're playing the game they think will net them safety and success...even though they may have better odds on some casino games instead.
I'm not raising money to prevent this for my new social network.
https://wonderful.dev/download
And how these shareholders materialize. I don't think show up at guileless founder's workplace with guns and make them offer they can't refuse?
> but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering..
Personally I don't doubt that. But if people are taking outside money while being aware of its effects I don't know what kind of sympathy they deserve.
It can end up being a more circuitous path than you might expect.
For instance, I took investment in my business, about five years in, from a very ethically and strategically aligned individual, as we mutually saw an opportunity to do something good together.
His life took a left turn. Two kids and wife in a horrendous car crash, all left extremely disabled, enormous medical and emotional costs. After a year or so he had little option but to sell his holding in our business, and we allowed it, knowing that his situation had become dire. He sold to a small PE consortium, who again, looked pretty well aligned with what we were doing.
The consortium all then had a falling out, as one member had brokered a deal with a large PE group to be bought out. This ground on for another year or so, us on the sidelines, until eventually the large PE group managed a hostile takeover.
And that’s how we found ourselves with blackstone as our corporate overlords.
It all went to shit over the following years as we were forced to squeeze margins, cut R&D investment, and depart from our original mission to instead gouge our customers.
I ended up leaving, as going to bat for the dark side every morning was beyond corrosive for me, and while it was a pretty terrible financial decision, it saved my life.
The company grinds on, a thing utterly different to what I founded. I don’t ask for sympathy, just… perhaps awareness that taking any investment, no matter how benign, can take you places you’d never wish to go.
It can happen even without investment. I’ve seen businesses where cofounders have had to sell out due to poor health or similar, and the outcomes have ended up pretty much the same.
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality.
Oh 1000%.
I once worked at a company where the founder had famously said many times that he would never take the company public. But then, he had a stroke. And within two years they had an IPO. Started doing what every other 'big company' did instead of their own thing. And from what I heard from folks on the inside, Enshittification happened pretty quick after I left.
The lack of addressing the loose ethics of 'Behavioral Psychologists' working in these fields, is TBH a bit of a stain on the whole profession.
You are what you earn.
If you construct your business model so that revenue is derived from attention, then your business will become a machine for consuming attention.
While “maximizing shareholder value” is a huge problem, aren’t there other problems too? Founders wanting to get rich as quickly and as easily as possible, customers/users refusing to pay even for most important services (for example, how many people are willing to pay 5 bucks a month for something as important to modern life as email? But they’re happy to pay 5$ for a crappy Starbucks coffee), lawmakers too old or too corrupt to understand the negative effects of the products/markets they’re supposed to regulate, general public more interested in convenience and cheap entertainment than subjects like privacy, parents simply hooking their kids up with iPads so they don’t have to deal with tantrums (one of my colleagues told me he was raised by TV/internet, not by humans)… and on and on.
I suppose we’re living in an age of unchecked capitalism. But there are other issues too
“Shareholder value” is what turned “we’re a family here” into a joke and cliche. It turns people into lines on a spreadsheet and strips leadership of their ability to care or treat people as humans. It’s represents the very darkest side of capitalism. Im very much a capitalist but it doesn’t mean I have to ignore the realities of it, both good and bad. I’ll take it over all alternatives though as it actually works and improves the lot of society as a whole
Why „historically“?
For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder, but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC community, which I say "historically"
YC parted ways with the broader HN community at some ill-defined moment coming up on a decade ago. YC started as an inspiring rejection of credentialism and cronyism and slick people jumping the queue in front of tech-focused problem solvers from diverse backgrounds. The values of HN around curiosity, technical meritococracy, tangible solutions to real pain points in the lives of real people underserved by big money tech establishment dynamics were completely aligned with early YC, they went hand-in-glove.
But it got captured by slick dealmakers who managed to cop the hoodie aesthetic and youthful ambition vibe but were the same born-to-privilege punks that have always ruined everything good in computing eventually. Now its messaging is vibe code and gladhand and suck up to whichever political party won last. Its a more insular, more inbred, less substantial network of the "right" kinds of people than the Ivy League was when it stepped on the scene.
And there's nothing inevitable about it, no "big money always goes to shit" story here: its 4 or 5 key people who abruptly had a serious seat at the table and chose very fucking selfishly.
HN is still here geeking out and being a gem on the internet.
It’s probably somewhat relevant that VC’s are the planet’s most rapacious sociopaths at this point.
I admit I don’t really know the cause and effect dynamic here. Is that what makes VC’s successful, or the reverse?
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook.
As an outsider I don’t believe it. Morals? I don’t even see a nugget or trace of some elevated goal in all of these stories.
Shareholders or not, the companies have to make money. Now us users have been gaslit for years about us just being too stingy to “pay for the product”, therefore we “become the product”. But all of these gamification/social media platforms were made to be free. Obviously there had to be a path to monetization. Morals or not. And they all end up in the same place.
Duolingo was co-founded by the inventor of Captcha. One of the ideas was to use people as translators, similar to the Mechanical Turk idea of letting people do some chore and using the product. Anyway, they also monetized eventually. Now what has Duolingo actually done for langauge learning? According to many people now, nothing. Look on YouTube. People post about their streaks. I.e. the gamification. The last video I saw was barely about how Duolingo helped at all. They had the typical “of course you can’t use only Duolingo” and then they listed all the other approaches and techniques. Well, did Duolingo serve any role? They said repetition. Well the repetition is for very artificial and out of context words and phrases. That Duolingo learners are like fish out of water in a context where they have to apply their knowledge is a meme at this point.
Another fun, very SC thing[1] about DuoLingo is/was the volunteer community. Yes of course a volunteer community to boost the for-profit platform. That’s how you get Klingon.
The AI-fication, aggressive ads, and pay-to-streak (you can artificially pause a streak for a whole month apparently) has made people worry and complain. And not because they are making a good language learning app worse to use, even. It seems to be mostly that people are hooked to the streak and are now even more annoyed by the hoop they have to go through (the app itself) to maintain it.
So what did Duolingo (DL) achieve? It made people fret and worry about their streak. That’s it. I had a friend who was so glad that he was getting close to a one-year streak on DL. Why? Because then he could quit. I wrote like one or two sentences that I recalled in his target language. He didn’t understand it.
[1] See StackExchange. I remember Jeff Atwood’s very humble blog piece about how he made his millions. It was of course all him but he had a good upbringing and access to good schools of course. No mention of the employees, but that’s just normal capitalist things so that’s fine. But also no mention that he made a platform based on volunteer work. Hmm. Self-made man? In SC culture he is. Because getting users/fools to work for you for free is the ultimate disruption.
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I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage.
Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse - the gym makes more money when I use the product less, just so long as I don't leave.
Microsoft office or Mario Kart do not need me to be addicted - they just need me to buy the software. Even Photoshop with a subscription model doesn't pursue addiction strategies - why would they? Just make it useful enough for me to keep paying for it, and that's plenty good. Maybe it's actually closer to the gym in that sense.
Which products are the ones that require addiction?? The ones that are free to use but cost money to provide.
IOW - In many ways this is our fault for expecting social media and many other services to be provided to us for free, relying on ads to pay for it.
I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? My guess is close enough to zero to ensure failure. But I tell you what - I'd probably pay for it myself. And I'd be very lonely.
Edit: Replaced all-caps with italics.
I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative.
I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic used to pick an ad must be independent of user derived data, including session data, ip address, time of day, country, past viewing history and so on.
Whilst thoroughly supporting the ban hammer on most forms of advertising, I'm pragmatic enough to understand multiple strategies are required.
We need to educate friends and family about ads, help them understand the harms, give them tools to avoid them.
No one should be browsing the internet without an ad blocker in 2025, certainly no one we love.
This is completely wild to me. I honestly do most of my clothes shopping through Instagram/Facebook ads. I enjoy that targeted advertising shows me new products and companies that I'm interested in, often very niche stuff that I don't come across otherwise. I would so much rather see that than ads for life insurance, penis pills, ambulance chasers, or whatever other bullcrap goes to the lowest common denominator. The ads that get read on podcasts are a great example of this.
If I'm going to pay for something by watching ads, I much rather watch fewer, higher value, more targeted ads. Untargeted ads are less valuable (to me, the advertiser, and the ad publisher), so I would have to see a lot more of them to pay for the content I consume.
I'm really not big on advertising. I dislike ads as much as anyone, especially when they're obnoxious and intrusive.
But I feel like a lot of people, on here especially, have this "all advertising is the devil period lalalala" attitude, but it does have real value. People don't like that it's been taken to a psychologically manipulative science of big brands being shoved down your throat. But I have genuinely found the ad experience on FB/IG to be the best there ever was. I do legitimately find out about things that I end up buying and liking and people ask where I got it and laugh when I say "a Facebook ad."
Worshipping the elite won't make you become one of them...
Very thoughtful contribution, thank you.
I'll just say this: make the algorithm work for you.
Founder of a social-media-adjacent startup here — 100% agree that monetization model, moreso than funding etc is the core problem.
The decisions for which I am most grateful my co-founders and I have made, from day one, were to 1) have a monetization model that's not reliant on usage and 2) not set goals against usage.
Granted, we're a bit of a peculiar case because of the market we serve (giving parents a screen-free alternative to smartphones and social media for their kids). But personally, my experience here has given me hope that other monetization models _can_ pave the way for non-addictive social products to flourish.
> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it?
In 2022, mastodon.social was provisioned at a cost of 0.6EUR/year/user for 191k users [1]. This price is payable even by many people in poor countries. People would pay for something like this same as they pay for other stuff, assuming it was well designed and gave users power to do stuff.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385
The server costs would be tiny compared to moderation, legal, and R&D.
0.6 EUR/year/person was the entire cost including moderation and R&D. I don't think any legal costs were incurred. If you built a federated social media where individual instances are responsible for their own moderation, then the software maker doesn't have to incur those costs.
Seems like only solution for social media is to make it as open-source, tax-funded public service. No-engagement/gamification, no-ads, no-spyware.
And yet probably less alone than when using polluted and terrible social media.
I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.
[flagged]
Those interested in this branch of the discussion might find Dave Winer’s blog series about building an open social network on top of the RSS standard worth a read. Here’s one of many posts: http://scripting.com/2025/06/28/211301.html
But even paid business models get polluted with the usage driven metrics over time. Netflix is paid but now has advertisements. They have stated that their main competitor is sleep, which is obviously detrimental to the user. How do we prevent this from happening for such a paid social media?
Netflix introduced an additional billing model to cater to those folks who would prefer ads to a subscription fee, but has not removed the no-ads model for a higher fee. I'm happy to pay for my ad-free Netflix, and I respect that others might want to choose differently. This is not a dark pattern, it's a light/good/gold (?) pattern.
I disagree. Introducing ads just to then effectively increasing the price of the no-ads plan is scummy, rent-seeking behavior.
Ironically the Black Mirror episode from Netflix called Common People is the best dystopic extrapolation of this kind of behavior that I have seen.
As long as the founders aren't looking to make billions, it's very possible to run a healthy social media platform, as evidenced by Front Porch Forum [1]. 20 employees, human moderators (gasp)! There's also Metafilter which is paid [2].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/10/front-p...
[2] https://www.metafilter.com/
> The current sign-up fee is US$5; it's a one-time fee and is the only cost associated with using the site.[1]
That's…surprisingly cheap. Which reminds me that I keep meaning to set up an SDF or tildeverse account.
[1] https://www.metafilter.com/faq.mefi#1
Are we overthinking this?
Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis.
As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever.
But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a million dollars.
That's why I like it. To raise funds, they sell books, playing cards, instructional videos. With non-invasive "tiny ads" which they self-parody.
Small is beautiful. The current internet is ruled by evil reptiles seeking to rip off your time, your data, your privacy, your friends... "Don't be evil" is dead and gone.
Turn back the clock 30 years. I did. And I'm happy.
This may be a misinterpretation tangent, but I play tennis and do a bit of inline skating, and I find one of the benefits is it provides a grounding to the real, physical world; time away from the constant feed of new shit on the internet. I also get in-person human interaction, which is an additional grounding effect. I've made plenty of friends as a result of both activities, and these friends cover a wide spectrum of personalities and backgrounds and life experiences.
This isn't necessarily turning the clock back 30 years, it's just finding some (of the plenty of) other activities I can enjoy that don't require a screen.
Additionally, for both of these activities, if your mind is elsewhere you can't do it. You have to be 'present'. Tennis is technically difficult to play proper shots (and I'm not particularly good at it, I enjoy the challenge of getting better) and inline skating, well, if you take your mind / eyes off your environment for a second you're putting your bodily integrity at risk. Having that 'presence' or singular focus is also grounding. It clears a lot of the other shit that builds up.
And, not that I feel this viscerally, there's no manipulation of my intent around my activity: I don't get derailed onto a track I wasn't intending to follow.
Good you are already there!
Midunderstanding tangent, I don't think so. Arnold says to get off the phone, get out into the real world. Totally aligned with what you are saying.
I signed up for the gym, got my partner to do the same, sought out and found some good volunteer work where I was needed. Too much screen time is not good, but old school newsletters that are relevant work just fine. They always have. Be the change you want to see, all that mumbo jumbo can actually work. Sure community can be the catalyst.
totally
"i want to help people connect!!! but i gave up when i noticed i wasnt gonna get easy money"
then you dont wanna help people..
true. Some of the best sites are .com but function like .orgs - I really like the all volunteer efforts but it takes a good leader to keep it running
Money can be like crack and big tech has plenty of addicts
I use tildes.net quite a bit. It’s not for everyone but it’s great to have for those that like it.
looks good. old school discussion sites were just fine. The larger corporations are big scams, ripping off your personal details, your relationships, your photo library, and who knows what else, and up to 99% of users have no clue. Nothing to be gained, everything to lose.
Even facebook emojis can be entered into the record in a court of law during a divorce proceeding. A fleeting moment of trying to make someone feel better, or more likely, to get a thumbs up, becomes a permanent electronic record completely removed from fleeting circumstances. That nonsense is potentially very dangerous
Ooh that looks like a great site! Would you consider sending me an invite? My email is in my profile.
Going to recommend "Addiction by Design" here. Superb book about the addiction design dynamics in the gambling industry and very reminiscent of what we see in the smartphone/internet universe today. Shout out to the forgotten HN user who recommended it originally, one of the best and most salient books I've read in years.
Also Nir Eyal’s Hooked, which used to be standard reading at tech startups in the “Growth Hacking” era
His followup book, Indistractable, is also quite good.
This reminds me of my borderline exhausting quest to build a wiki for golf that isn’t extractive like most golf sites.
Trying to bootstrap it without any funding is a lot, but necessary, and I have to run it on a shoestring. The frustrating part is that with all networks the flywheel is everything. Once you get the product on people’s phones, the value is easy to see, but to get the app in their phones, you need a bunch of money to create value to get people there.
This is why the VC funding is so pernicious and why projects like mastodon, lemmy, and pixelfed are so difficult to get off the ground. The point is almost always the network itself more than the product.
I’ll keep trying to just do it slow and steady, even if it takes me a decade. I honestly don't care if I fail because I know the people out there that care about golf course architecture just want a place to talk about the courses they love.
https://golfcourse.wiki
That's cool. Good luck
Thanks!
Aside from the occasional 503 error (again, I'm trying to get as much as possible out of the cheapest plan), it works pretty well.
With technological products in particular—where an idiosyncratic nerd with an old computer under the desk can run a vibrant forum, a couple of plucky young “cofounders” can conjure a company from nothing, and HN (at least at one point [0]) can sway the entire tech culture from a single process on a single server—isn’t it an option to… not grow?
I guess the LLM era makes credible products more capital-intensive than they used to be, but even so, the vendors are pricing their stuff aggressively, and even when they try to squeeze the prices later, half these foundation models that are better-than-last-year’s-SOTA are open-source!
If you want to play with lots of money and seek out lots of money, there’s lots of money swirling around seeking to involve you in that game. But if you just want to make something nice and human-scale and small, what better time than now?
The path to billions of bucks may require mercenary bucks-extracting behavior, but that’s not the same as a growth imperative being an inevitable force of nature.
I can’t help but feel like the Small Web folks are on to something.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522
I was talking with a friend who is a camp counselor for a small summer camp the other day and they said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices.
This power intermittent reinforcement in the on-ramp of addiction is scary powerful.
Do we have any ways to innoculate ourselves and the future generations against it?
The author poses changing the game which is support. I guess the trendy “dopamine fast” is a tool against this or weekly screen free time. Maybe more education on intermittent reinforcement or a D.A.R.E-like program for apps (a this one is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not really).
> said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices.
Wow that’s scary. Such powerful addiction at such a young age
Parents let them.
Individual parents don't have that much of a choice unless they want to turn their kids into social pariahs.
Can you provide any sources on that?
I've only been able to find articles that counter it[1][2][3][4], and nothing more rigorous than a Pew survey.
It feels right, and I recall feeling similarly about certain items/events as a teen, but teens aren't known for having the most measured interpretations of reality.
1: https://medium.com/@helmisantosa/teens-without-smartphones-h... 2: https://screenstrong.substack.com/p/can-you-raise-a-teen-tod... 3: https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/teenag... 4: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/smartphones-flip-phones-screen-...
...so some parents feel peer pressure from kids too?
The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not spoken: government regulation.
FTFA:
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
Right, maybe social networks are a utility, like electricity or ISPs
You effectively need or greatly benefit from gas, water, electricity and an ISP.
What do you really get out of social media? I mean other than most of you getting crippling anxieties about things that aren’t even real, of course.
Sure sure, I know, everyone wants it because they need to share photos of the kiddos with grandma out of country. No one needs it because they enjoy the shallow bullshit and dopamine and snarky retorts that enforce their ideology.
Social media is relied on by a lot of people for official notifications. When I was in high school, my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days. I'm sure there are lots of valid reasons for schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, official media networks etc. to have social media accounts, and for regular people to follow them.
I've always thought it would be a good idea for governments to run their own mastodon servers for this, but something else with accounts (not publicly) tied to real identities could be interesting.
> my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days
Believe it or not, they post that on their own websites.
We had to turn on the TV and watch the marquee they would add to all shows. If you missed your school you had to go to another channel to see where in the alphabet they were.
You have not made a convincing argument. Social media has specifically moved away from synchronous time-prioritized posting in favor of algorithm engagement. So I can’t accept “notifications” as a legitimate use.
Social media is a pretty wide term and includes networks where you mostly talk to your friends and relatives to networks where you mostly consume content from strangers.
The former has a clear benefit (especially where it challenges legacy industries with exploitative pricing like mobile phone networks) and even the latter can benefit you by exposing you to new ideas and information.
That social media is incentivized to push meaningless but addictive fluff over genuine communication due to monetary incentives is the point of TFA. This is a reason for making social media a public utility, not against it.
So the master plan is to let governments (known for tech illiteracy and 20-year procurement cycles) regulate hyper-evolving social media platforms? Why teach people to think critically or resist engineered dopamine traps when we can have a bunch of career bureaucrats draft laws while using Wordpad or Internet Explorer to Google “AI” xD
Regulation doesn't have to be at the level of controlling how technology is designed. It can be more creative, at the level of organizations or incentives, for example:
- Require advertising companies to follow special rules, including only doing advertising and nothing else
- Fund an agency that measures the health harms of large platforms and imposes fines or restrictions based on harm
I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.
Searched for “ink” in this thread hoping to find someone else who solved the problem like this
An e ink smartphone gives me hours of my life back daily.
Can not recommend enough
LCD screens attract us like ants to a dropped ice cream
Can you use Android Auto with it? Props for the change
I'm not sure about this. I heard mixed reports. I don't have a car so I can't test it.
Fascinating, bet the battery life is great. Probably no games on your phone but texting works like normal I'm guessing?
Battery life isn't as good as I expected, but I do leave the backlight on quite a bit. I'm not a big phone gamer, but some people do enjoy playing original (black and white) game boy games on them.
Texting works very well. I'm typing this on the phone right now. It's one of the smoothest eink devices I've ever encountered.
Changing the Accessibility settings on my iPhone to make the whole screen grayscale also does the same thing for me.
Camera and video calls feels like two major drawbacks. Also I've heard there are NFC problems.
For me, one of the hibreak pro buttons broke (top left one).
NFC payment works fine, but using google wallet on websites seem to fail for me.
Video calls are fine but obviously black and white and frame rate is approx 10fps or something.
Huge life upgrade compared to LCD smartphones. I’m crushing books like when in middle school. Best practical change to my life in maybe a decade
Camera isn't the greatest but it's fine for everyday needs. I haven't tried a video call yet. I imagine it will work okay, though. Tap to pay works fine for me, too.
Bogey man staff psychologists aren't to blame for these woes, and they certainly aren't some unstoppable force with reins to all things you do.
The Internet was "addicting" long before there was ever a concept of social networks the way that there is today. I used to sit on my computer from sun down to sun up way back in the mid 90s, and I knew hundreds of other people that did the same thing.
I've been "addicted" to social networks that predate modern capital schemes, such as message boards, IRC, AIM, ICQ, MMORPGs, and so on.
Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive?
I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.
For that matter—the apps that communities are using that aren’t so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns—like the one you and I are using now—could it be that they’re at some level the norm, they’re just kind of boring beyond the small group of people who find them useful?
Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad—but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes it).
To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer to the “tea” pattern than the “viral growth” paradigm. And those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to companies that primarily do real-world stuff—those tend to take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But maybe I’m just old fashioned :)
You should look at the history of tea closer, namely the Opium Wars and how the desire to not deflate their economy via consumption lead to it. Technically also a demonstration of the harm of bad economic practices likd precious metal standards and mercantalism as well.
Ive been very interested in a worker owned company, or at least representative democracy/republic style of ownership.
Now just need a successful startup to push the idea
Literally Mastodon.
I was addicted to reading newgroups using Larry Wall's trn program.
In trn, it is very easy to get a new screenful of text to appear, but it is hard to go back to what you were reading 3 screenfuls ago (unless you are still in the same message you were in 3 screenfuls ago, in which case, to get back, you could scroll up 3 times) which discourages reflection, which leaves fewer reasons not to constantly seek out the next dopamine hit (namely, the next passage of text that teaches you something).
My point is that neither trn nor the newsgroups were in any way VC-funded. There also weren't any non-VC-funded startups or companies involved: when I started browsing them in 1991, the software that ran the newsgroups was entirely designed, implemented and operated by volunteers. Yes, these volunteers mostly worked for tech companies, universities or governmental research labs (because in those days, most people with internet connectivity got it through their workplace and most normal workplaces did not have internet connectivity) but their involvement in the newsgroups did not figure into their employer's evaluation of their work performance.
My point is that VCs are not the whole of the problem. Not even the profit motive is the whole of the problem. The problem can show up in a program distributed under an open-source license for hobbyist or communitarian reasons.
The problem is not the apps, the problem is the users. Which means the problem is human nature.
Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against.
Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion.
The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror.
There are no solutions.
Absolutely not. People are not asking for dark patterns to engineer their behavior to maximize retention. This is like locking a kid in a room full of candy, and then blaming them for gorging themselves.
I think, with no supporting data whatsoever, that this is a classic case of stated vs revealed preferences.
We all think we want a place to find community, learning, connection, etc, but given the choice will choose stimulus.
So, if given the choice of 10 social networks, on a scale of extremely stimulating to extremely connecting, we’ll end up choosing the stimulating one.
In which case, it seems tricky to find a business model fixes this more fundamental problem
I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?
The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention?
If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.
Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.
Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.
Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.
BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.
It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry.
Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.
Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.
Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?
I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says.
The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block).
Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
> Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
Valid question - however I have a feeling that for shaping perception of such behaviors we need a stronger middle class - and my hope for it shrinks every day
By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?
I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful market share, which would help reduce time the world spends on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps
And if it gets meaningful ”market share”, the business incentives are pulling in the direction of growth, which is the articles point.
In many segments, especially ones served digitally, only one or a few companies will survive. It's very much "grow or die".
That's a narrative that makes no sense. If a company is profitable, it doesn't "die". If customers like your product and their friends are on your platform, they have no reason to leave to another.
Pardon my ignorance but is that expensive to run a social platform?
Running a social media platform can be very expensive, and it only gets more expensive every day.
Media takes a lot of storage and bandwidth, and you basically have unbounded costs if you want to meet user expectations for posting media.
similar discussions around liquor and tobacco in days past?
Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”.
But that’s not exactly true, is it?
Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today.
Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.
Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.
In most places liquor, while legal, is seriously regulated, and alcoholism is considered a sickness worth treating. Alcohol's effects are visibly debilitating, from poor driving to the very ability to stand without falling or speak coherently.
Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos, etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences are much more underhanded.
> We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.
I deleted an app every month until my phone was so boring I threw it in a drawer and canceled my cell phone subscription. It confuses and annoys everyone around me, but my attention span, happiness, and productivity have skyrocketed so I really do not care what the addicts think. It works for me.
I truly encourage everyone to consider how humans survived before smartphones. All of that still works fine today. 5 years cell-phone free.
It might surprise you that we do in fact live in a society.
No cell phone at all, or do you carry a feature phone?
No cell phone at all as I do not wish to have my location sold, rely on proprietary tech, or to be reachable at all times. I also use cash exclusively IRL so my digital footprint away from home is virtually zero.
I am happiest being intentional and present in whatever I am doing. I am reachable from my desktop by email, matrix, or VoIP SMS, when I am at my desk and have been able to run a profitable security research and consulting business this way.
I do have a very small laptop I carry when I am going to be away from my desk more than one business day, but the overwhelming majority of the time I have no electronics of any kind on my person when I leave home.
Typically I carry a mechanical watch, a micro-wallet, and sometimes a notebook, or mechanical puzzle.
Which mechanical watch?
My go-tos are the CIGA Eye Of Horus and the Bradley Element, both using a Leatherman Tread for a band with TreadLinks adapters so I always have some basic tools with me which get used a surprising amount.
Very cool looking designs. I’ve always been partial to the more straightforward Rolex explorer myself, but it’s far too expensive for my tastes.
So what’s wrong with open source social network ? They don’t have the issue mentioned, because they don’t have investor there is no need to optimize kpi and when it’s optimized the infrastructure cost can be minimized a lot.
See mastodon for instance.
Yet it doesn’t catch up in popularity, seems like people do prefer the traditional Facebook, twitter and instagram.
You can only show a donkey where water is but you can’t force it to drink.
I read and enjoyed the post, but also found it a bit directionless. Yes, I think a lot of people agree that addictive social media is a problem. What's the solution?
> The deeper issue is that we’ve outsourced our human connection to systems designed for profit. Real connection happens in the margins that can’t be monetized. The conversations that don’t generate data, the relationships that don’t scale, and the moments that can’t be optimized for engagement.
This sounds profound, but this is a problem that predates social media. People went to shows and music festivals to see art and connect with others - these are systems also designed for profit (and delivering art as their second thing.)
The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money. The suggestion the author makes: "improve third spaces where people connect directly, authentically, without intermediation by systems designed to extract value from their attention", except someone has to pay for those third spaces, and people won't always want to visit them because we like dopamine, so we might go to the bar, or back on social media, or to video games or tv shows instead. A slow pace - boredom - breeds creativity and connection, but it's also boring, and it's hard to get people to stay with it (I might be projecting.)
> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.
On a different note, this closing feels very, very ChatGPT, and whether it is or isn't, the fact that AI tone is permeating our writing makes me really sad.
"The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money."
It's not that much of a problem because it doesn't cost that much money.
A full rack and 1gb at he.net costs something like $350/mo. I think it's $500 if you get the entire 10gb. Very fast servers are available for, basically, shipping charges on ebay.
The cost that seems prohibitive is all of the flashing lights and fancy imagery and reactive design, etc.
Further, the frameworks and scaffolding that enable all of the tracking and ads ... are themselves expensive and this complexity becomes self-reinforcing.
A final unnecessary set of costs is the neurotic compulsion for 5-9s reliability and perfect, instantaneous responsiveness from every geography.
What does it cost to run lobste.rs ? Metafilter ? HN ?
I think any reasonably resourced individual could do it as a hobby in their spare time - especially if you strip away the CDNs and the load balancers and the expensive frameworks, etc.
Last paragraph seems to speak without speaking.
> We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.
> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.
In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?
He's not. Anything he has in mind is socially unacceptable and he knows it.
We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea and they can't agree on anything.
And then there's also https://preview.redd.it/hv628lvgpdva1.jpg?width=1574&format=...
Which I'm pretty sure is an unsolved problem?
The author doesn’t suggest it, but the implicit solution is public funding for social goods.
That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding for social media that is not supported other ways.
Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social media.
Government regulation / laws
And whats more, there is only one law you need to change. You simply need to remove common carrier exemptions from hosts so that if false or misleading information is delivered to a user from a platform, that platform can be sued for damages.
Its the rule that newspapers and TV need to live by, social media should play by the same rules.
The platforms then simply need to protect themselves my making sure they accurately identify users posting on their networks, so they can pass the cost of any lost lawsuit onto the original poster.
Goddamn it, that misinformation is like a fucking weed.
One positive that I have seen lately among older teens, is they are starting to realize how much of a waste of time staring into a screen all day is. At some point, you realize that life is short and watching short clips for hours on end is robbing you of that.
> We need a fundamental re-evaluation of what our phones should be for, whether these platforms can ever return to their original purpose of actually bringing us together instead of keeping us scrolling
Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.
This is an idealized version of real life. If youre autistic you know the pains of having to feign every time in order to not stand out because of your inexpressions or how you dont find what others say very interesting. On top of that, most things youre interested on are in some small forum on the internet where its the only small space where you find your peace. I agree with some things especially about how we spend so much time on unreal things but lets not idealize real life where if you dont talk about something, youre boring. And that something is most of the time about critisizing others all the time. We truly prefer being angry or very sad rather than alone. Thats basically why the algorithm works. It exploits our solitude. But its being built exponentially, its just the natural step on books, radio, tv , each medium more summarised, quick and polarising and monolithic than the previous one.
I love that idea, I just wish I knew how to precipitate it in my local community beyond just trying.
My theory is that local community is "just trying".
> Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together.
Agreed. Social networks not only didn't bring us together, they've actually done the opposite and made us more tribal. Excellent book on the topic is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear us Apart by Nicholas Carr.
OP mentions how Facebook introduced engagement algorithms to Instagram and how Twitter followed suit, but doesn’t mention that Facebook was also the first to popularize engagement algorithms in 2011 via their News Feed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)#History
Late in the thread, but is this really addiction?
How do you differentiate between addiction and people really liking something? In my opinion, unless people try to stop doing the thing but they can't will themselves to do that, it isn't an addiction.
It is not OK to dilute terms used to describe serious problems. I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect. Mere dependency or development of a habit isn't addiction. addiction is those things plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort.
Perhaps a good litmus test might be a person's ability to go on a week-long vacation without their phones, internet or whatever the supposed addiction might be.
There are addictions like Porn or eating-disorders that can be exasperated by tech, but they're not "technology usage" addictions, they're "addictions that can be enabled by technology".
> addiction is [dependency] plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort
> I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect
Which planet do you live on? It's hard to read this in good faith.
Nobody has a "technology usage" addiction. The digital dopamine drip-feed in your pocket delivers by design in a way a spoon or double-entry bookkeeping does not, despite the fact that you can use the spoon to get high on a substance you traded for money.
It sound like you are well educated on the mechanics of addiction, using terms like "dopamine" as if that indicates addiction. People get dopamine from all sorts of every day activities and interactions, care to explain how that indicates addiction? If I exercise habitually (which gives tons of dopamine) do I have an addiction or just a habit I enjoy?
Did you know that even LSD/Acid has no biological/medical addiction property, but caffeine does? Addiction requires a literal rewiring of the brain at a biological level.
And please try to avoid the passive-aggressive "which planet do you live on" tone, it doesn't help with the whole civilized discussion thing on HN :)
the difference is simple, addiction is the compulsive/habitual action of something that does not have positive effects, more likely negative than neutral. For example, being "addicted" to gym is fine, because even if you enjoy the dopamine after, not the actual exercise, it's still good for you overall, and you cannot really overdo it. Caffeine makes you more productive, and you cannot really spiral, hence why caffeine is legal, but opioid drugs are not.
But for tech, scrolling tiktok for 5 hours a day, definitely does not have positive outcomes. It's like gambling. It's dopamine hit for dopamine hit's sake, and the delivery system is actively harming you.
If a person has a bad habit of needing to drink a bottle of beer and drive to work every day, would you call that an addiction or just a bad habit? I would call the drinking an addiction but the drinking-and-driving a bad habit.
Caffeine is a good example you mentioned, it is in fact addictive. It forms a chemical dependency similar to nicotine. Not all addictions are harmful and not all bad habits are addictions. The 'dependency' is what qualifies the habit as an addiction, in other words, you can't function or function well without the habit.
Empty comment from me but thank you for being more nuanced than most about what constitutes an addiction. It’s tiring to listen to the HN wringing in some performance of outrage of who can be the most offended yet least affected by the article.
(The moderator(s) are praised endlessly but have done a terrible job of steering the community. They’ve merely shut out voices that were the loudest and most disagreeable, a phyrric victory at best)
There are plenty of addictions where the incentive to stop never appears, and I wouldn't call those "not" addictions just because someone hasn't tried to stop or had a reason to.
Scientifically speaking, I would expect that pattern of habit to be studied, and for individuals to be unable to quit, and for actual electro-chemical rewiring of the brain (as nicotine,caffeine and harder drugs do) to be established.
Until then, why can't it just be called a habit? addiction very strongly implies inability to quit. Have you seen the 90's congressional testimony of tobacco CEO's all swearing on oath that Nicotine isn't addictive? That's how strong of a case you have to make for an addiction to be established. If you dilute the term and use it anonymously with "habit" then actual addictions can be dismissed or crooked people that facilitate addictions can avoid consequences.
At the very least, there needs to be a pattern of inability to quit the habit. Positive reinforcement signals are not in themselves indicators of addiction (case in point: LSD/Acid -- it isn't considered addictive, neither is good tasting food on its own).
I disagree, consider someone who is rich enough to afford a heroin addiction without ending up dead, in jail or institutionalized. They may never have a rock bottom that makes them question their use and try to stop. Their quality of life might drop, they may lose friends, family, business, etc, but they are insulated from the kinds of real pressures that force people without means to stop.
I would not say that person does not have an addiction. They are just as much of an addict as the person who shoots heroin and can't stop despite being broke, arrested for stealing, etc.
Addiction and mental illness tend to be defined by their impacts on people's quality of life and impact on functioning, whether that is just functioning basically, maintaining long-term healthy relationships or just being happy without substances.
In your example, I agree with you, they do have an addiction. It does not contradict with what I said. The person not needing to stop and their inability to stop if they tried are two different things. Heroin does form a chemical dependency, where it could even be life threatening to quite cold-turkey, and therefore it is addictive.
Unlike mental illness, addiction is defined by formation of a dependency. sometimes that dependency is at the biological/chemical level, sometimes it is a psychological dependency (can be caused by mental illness), not nevertheless a dependency must exist that prohibits the addict from functioning without the cause of the addiction. Bad habits can cause adverse impacts just as addictions can, and addictions (like coffee - which forms an actual biological rewiring/dependency, people get severe migraines when trying to quit it) can be harmless unless you're trying to quit.
I don't think this is correct. I believe the clinical definition of an addiction requires it to be actively harmful to your life - meaning, if you're "addicted" to something but it's good for you, it's not an addiction. Because the addiction part requires you doing something self-destructive.
> Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission.
Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time.
They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.
> Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users".
Right, which is impractical, and after direct democracy comes representational democracy. Eventually you get things like libraries or public parks, public goods managed by government employees. The main difference this time is the need for more transnational cooperation. Other than that, it should be relatively easy and cheap.
This is about determining which content a user wants to see and showing it to them without having influence over that selection be susceptible to influence by third parties.
I'll concede that there aren't heterarchical solutions to all of our problems, but it does not follow that there isn't a heterarchical solution to this one.
Maybe the solution is that these services shouldn't be free, and you should pay for your usages. Then a non-profit could run an Instagram / tiktok clone and there would be no incentive to make the app more addicting, addiction would be even self-regulated to an extent by the fact that watching 10 hours of video might cost $5
Best social media platform already exists. Personal Blog (maybe) for public posts and Email + phone + IRL for friends.
Personal blog can be on blogger if needed. The nature of any blog is non algorithmic.
It's not about addiction. It's about providing value.
>The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers.
>Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.
This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction.
>Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics.
Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value.
>Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?
Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.
To add to this, BeReal flamed out because it was a gimmick that was quickly copied and then forgotten by all the other platforms.
Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-algorithmic TikTok would have no users.
And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse experience.
The moment you take VC money, you are obligated to attempt to achieve VC scale.
It’s nothing to do with social media, and everything to do with the wrong KPIs.
Monetization is the problem, not funding. Better monetization methods haven’t arisen because it’s impossible to compete with free. On the other hand I think it’s clear that the status quo is not creating unrealized value, but is actually causing tremendous harm and are a net negative. People who argue otherwise either have holy arguments about the infallibility of the market or a direct financial interest in the continuation of the ad sponsored status quo. The solution would be new laws that attack the profitability of today’s primary monetization method, not the actual act of social media itself.
Doing so would clear the undergrowth for the true innovators to take over and we’ll know who they are when people pay for their products, as functioning markets have always intended.
The best thing we could possibly do, besides throwing Musk and Zuckerberg in The Hague, is destroy targeted advertising as a business model. Everything, absolutely all of this is done so they can make fractions of a cent off of clicks. So long as they can, they will do everything possible to damage your brains into clicking more.
I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better product, because the product become the ad space.
Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
This is all true, but it's definitely not the full story. I'm addicted to HN despite it not being engineered for engagement. (though _technically_ it has taken investor money hahaha)
There are two things going on here.
The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally).
The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours?
It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc.
If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users.
To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns.
Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.
an article on the problems of social media with no mention of the federated platforms? seems like a huge omission
it is. There are many websites and applications that I use, like wikipedia and linux / kde that could help if they picked an application like Mastodon and promoted it on their site. I only use social media about once a month so I am far from expert but an ad supported open source facebook clone that stayed non profit by sending its profits to other open source sites would be ideal.
There is still a deeper problem, which the article didn't tackle. We don't need social media in general. Some forums and platforms for geeks and freaks are enough. We don't need perfectly orchestrated or fairly designed apps to simulate genuine connection, which works best without any digital help what so ever.
So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other.
The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.
I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source.
Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.
It’s very obvious in 2025, have deleted all my social accounts, (maybe still a bit of reddit). Kids are definitly not allowed even close to it.
100% correct it’s about the business model/funding. Just make it in your basement and don’t take vc capital and let it take a decade and you’ll be the only used social network.
I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website
Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?
Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.
> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?
Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea.
Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move.
Social networks are even more difficult to bootstrap because they’re not worth paying for if you can’t find people to socialize with. Nobody wants to sign up for an empty social network.
Even the free social networks have a hard time getting started. There were dozens of Twitter competitors created after Twitter was acquired, but most of them languished. The few that have survived have their own problems that are driving many of their own fans away.
Kagi just passed 50k users: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members
They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.
Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building a "100 year company".
Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on.
I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product.
Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.
Maybe they needed the staff to build the software back then and now they could be leaner cos the product is already built. Maintaining is much easier than building.
In all honesty, it doesn't seem like 400 people were really needed to build the software. If you just look at credits in Adobe Premiere, for example, there's not 400 people in there, and it's a way more complex product than what Evernote is/was.
Given how many complaints about Google search you regularly see on this website and elsewhere, you would think there will be a lot more people willing to pay for non shitty search. And yet Kagi does not have enough paying users to fill a football stadium. To me, this validates GP’s point about how people love to talk about paying for services and then proceed to not pay for any services.
Kagi doesn't have network effects stacked against them. If your friends don't use Kagi, you still benefit from it. The same is not true for social media.
Kagi is cool (as a company), really.
The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach is the VC part. Looking and making sure that there's a market for the widget your factory produces is just due diligence.
You description is probably spot on, but boy I’d love to have a version of Instagram where I could just pay $5/month and get a time-sorted stream of photos of my friends’ babies, Piña coladas with a beach background, and sweaty mirror selfies in a gym without any stupid ads in the middle.
You can do that in some places: https://help.instagram.com/923021729404927?helpref=faq_conte...
People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an opportunity to poach some communities.
> People pay for software all the time.
Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs.
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.
> but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work
Even large, free, well-funded social networks are failing to get significant traction or running into echo chamber problems (Bluesky).
I've been hearing for years that a paid social network would work, but if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
If you want to see a real-world example of people squirming out of their claims that they'd pay for ad-free services, take a look at any HN thread discussing YouTube premium or their ad-block evasion efforts. The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it, yet when cornered the same audiences who claimed they'd pay for an ad-free version suddenly come up with a multitude of new excuses for why they're refusing to pay. My personal favorite claim (which invariably surfaces in every thread) is when people say they would happily pay for YouTube premium if they weren't so aggressive about adblockers.
Difficult, but not impossible. At $5/month (the $3 difference wouldn't trigger any price sensitivity, talking from real experience) that's 10000 users. If your service actually provides value, you can crank it even higher. Again, difficult, but totally within the realm of possible.
Because the "traction" needed to make free and paid social network work is vastly different. You need insane scale (millions or tens of millions of users) to make free social network viable, hell, my stomach hurts from only thinking about it. A paid social network business, run with certain austerity, can be profitable with one thousand paid users.The hard part is how to acquire that 10000 paying users and how to make them stay.
I think a the problem is for every social media user who finds it valuable enough to pay, there are ten more who don’t use it enough justify paying. And if you only serve the first group but not the later, then the first group will just get bored and move back to X or Instagram, or they just ditch social media entirely and move into private group chats. And if you serve the later then your operation expenses will multiply.
> Do the math on how many people are necessary... you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business
Using the heuristic that HR costs are 2x the gross salary, the 10 people are earning 30K/year gross salary (no bonus). And I'm not leaving any room to pay for the compute/storage infra.
> The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it
Perhaps for you (in the US, I assume). The price is the same everywhere in the world, wages aren't. If you've the choice between paying for food and ad-blocking YouTube, or paying YouTube but having no money for food, the choice is obvious. Just like people here claiming Photoshop is an affordable piece of software...
i think that people vastly overstate the costs of this sort of thing and it's super bizarre. if you're treating this as a big official corporation™ and such and want to pay 500 devs like $200k/year or something to make work, then yeah you're gonna have problems.
but if you want to build a social network and aren't dreaming of being gazillionaires for it (which is quite reasonable), then you can get by very easily. how do I know this? because... well it's being done successfully. not was done successfully, is done successfully.
you can probably even get people to help out on it.
you can build a social network with a dedi running nginx hosting your Python application running on a Linux box backed against Postgres (and redis for session storage, although even that is a bit overkill) for like $80/month deployed with a "deploy.sh" script that you run to kick the damn thing into running (Docker is used in dev only, but could easily work here). should you probably add health checks or whatever? yeah. it still works really well.
this scales well past the 100k users mark.
what about video/images/etc? well, this nginx server happily sends out user uploaded video storing them as files on a bog standard ext4 filesystem. backups exist of the site.
the "stack" i mentioned here isn't fancy or particularly tightly optimized, it's in fact pessimized in a lot of ways. hell I know there were a gazillion ways we could improve performance of our application. show the backend app to a game dev and they'd probably want to start strangling people with how poorly optimized most of the actual app is.
and still, it scales well.
again, I stress that this isn't some theoretical idea, this is actively being executed. the entire venture makes money for the team from the users who willingly (and unforcibly in order to use the service, the actual site is free to use in its full form) give money. this isn't ZFS. this isn't Rust. this isn't using some blue-green deployment. this isn't spending hours toiling away at which sysctl to set to squeeze every last cycle out of each box. this isn't behind some massive CDN with "internet scale" boxen or even (for the video serving part) behind any anti-DDoS service.
it's just a matter of doing actual engineering and being willing to actually build the things you want to build.
I like stories like these, but I think you just never hit a breaking point with the infra and approaches you got. You've never exceeded your ext4 volume size, so no need for object storage. You've never had a server die, so one dedi box is fine. You've never had a paying customer call you with an issue, so oncall support is not needed.
So I totally agree with your approach.
yeah, i mean i guess what i'm trying to say is that the breaking point is very far up there as computers have gotten towards breakneck speeds, especially on the technology side, for the goal being achieved. it's downright difficult to hit the limits unless you're throwing effectively a DDoS at it.
i think the big thing though is that it's a community and so people are actually willing to support that even if it means the amount of 9s of availability is slightly fewer (although in practice, many providers bust right through their "9s" SLAs without a care in the world) and given a migration from a VM provider to the dedi occurred, migrations obviously can happen if failure presents itself.
There are comparatively no moderation expenses and public relations’ liability from random uploads with an email client.
Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success based on user base.
But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.
I’m not going to pay for something and still be the product. These sites would have to be fundamentally different from what they are today, for me to justify paying for them, starting with: they should not be collecting, selling, or profiting off of data about me. They should also not be deciding for me what ways I can use their products.
People bemoan “nobody’s willing to pay for an online newspaper” and that’s true: they won’t pay for them in their current user-monetizing form. Same with YouTube: I’m not going to pay for an ad-free YouTube in its current form: with auto-playing next videos, algorithmic recommendations, Shorts, and sponsored content embedded in some creators’ videos. Give me a different, better product that does not try to monetize me, and I might pay for it.
Because social networks are boring without users.
How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?
VC-funded means you have money for marketing.
But for a paid social network you can do marketing too. All you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
Only if people pay. Which they won't when there's nobody else on there. How do you get your first 100k users?
You might say, well, start with 1000 users. But 1000, or 10,000 isn't enough to make a social network interesting. Maybe you could get around this by making it about a specific niche to start with. But that probably won't work, and if it does, you'll end up stuck in that niche.
On the other hand, I don't think this idea is as impossible as people say it is. It's just highly unlikely to be successful, and far more complicated than simply paying someone on Upwork to make it for you.
Where will you get the initial money to do said marketing, if you have no (paying) users yet?
what if we mention AI somewhere???
There are several mature open source social network stacks. The barrier isn't technology.
If you’re not trying to make a business out of it, you don’t even need that much money. You could set up a Mastodon server and invite your friends. It might not get a lot of attention, but it will work.
It works for a niche (probably a professional one) but not for general population. You'd be hard pushed to get mum and pop to pay for this when FB is free and already has everyone on there. To them your new network seems inferior. It is more expensive and has less friends.
As a fun fact this existed circa 2002 in a big way in the UK. The site was friendsreunited. I'd love to have that back (along with associated hype a 5 quid a year pricing)
How do you get everyone to join - which is the important part?
How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?
For one thing you can use VC money to pay for ads
But for a paid social network you can do that too. All you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
If you want to launch a big viral marketing campaign, you also need someone who's willing to trade your predictions of future revenue for cash today, and VCs are by definition the people interested in making that trade. For something that depends on network effects, slowly trickling out one new ad every time you get 10 new signups isn't going to work.
The article Farmvillains in SF Weekly fifteen years ago said Zynga had a staff psychologist to guarantee that each iteration would be more addictive.
https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/farmvillains/article_eb8e2...
My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering. That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?
It feels like this is the optimism of early internet where "information wants to be free".
We got a solid 5 maybe 10 years of that (up through 2k)?
If you can't build it with a bunch of junior coders, then AI won't help you.
Social media is all about network effects and first mover advantage, one network turned textbook fascist and it's still going strong.
I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naïve hope indeed. Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee, are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of digital experience that they envision" does not maximise profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will be different this time and that now corporations will happily hand out everything for free and users will be empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it. The great thing about free markets is that those who want to will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small just like it is now.
Building the social media platform you want to see isn’t really the problem though. They are relatively easy to build, the hard part is making it valuable enough to attract users and earning enough to keep it running.
Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core challenge there.
The article mentioned that we can reconnect offline life and redesign the platform to encourage real human interaction instead of endless scrolling. Imagine a social app that encourages you to exit the screen and meet friends instead of constantly scrolling. It should feel good.
I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.
And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.
Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.
Easier is not always better.
I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*
What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?
My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay. Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the change.
I can't see why wouldn't it work. You definitely have some options. Group or family subscriptions is one. Then you can have extra charges for people for example that post above the average (it would make sense to extra charge those who abuse posting). If someone is unable to pay for some reason don't cancel the account(s) simply make those read-only. So even if they don't pay they are not excluded. Bear in mind that people pay for lots of subscriptions! Streaming services, newspapers, vpns, etc. So again if is setup as a profitable but not greedy profit business it should work. One of the key things is convincing people why using a non-manipulative social network is a way better choice than the "free" options. I'm not very good with business ideas but I do believe that there's absolutely room for a healthy social network out there.
What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system.
So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.
Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.
> This isn't because founders are evil
Sounds like something an evil founder would say
Perhaps this all goes even deeper - it's screen addiction, not only social media addiction, though social media in 2025 is a very powerful and addictive drug (in all senses of it)
This hits the nail for my sentiments about the matter. Good that someone who was actually in the business confirm it.
Been going on long before Silicon Valley was even a thing. Sugar industry for example.
> What might actually work
This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.
Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern.
Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.
This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my adjacent comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009
Indeed. The first thing I think of when I read "engineered addictions" is fast food like McDonalds and Subway. People work very hard to make sure the taste and smell is addictive but that the food is not satiating.
For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.
Honestly it always comes back to, we need a healthier relationship with our tools. The phone, social media, etc. It's all a tool. And yes it can be highly addictive but so are drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. all easily accessible and how we deal with it comes down to ourselves. It's what environment you put yourself in, and if that environment is one that includes a lot of screens then there's a sliding scale as to how corrupted you'll become by it. If you're at places where theres alcohol and cigarettes I mean it's highly likely you're going to smoke and drink. The only things that really beat all of this is a way of life that recognises that it can or is poisonous and many things must be avoided e.g get off social media. It was built to be addictive, that's not going to change.
As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
> healthier relationship with our tools
The point is that these are not tools, they provide a direct kick, which is a goal in itself. Whisky is not a tool.
agreed its like saying that jerking off makes you healthier
Wait, it doesn't? /s
Its actually healthy to jerk off at least 20 times per month or so i read
algorithm feed addiction is unsolvable, at least without some new drug.
As an immigrant to the US, I found dessert in US contains much more sugar than where I was. And when I make/recommend less sugary food, friends don't like it even though some of them admitted that's healthier.
so similar to diabetes, I would expect Ozempic for algorithm feed addiction will be available one day to solve this, or at least sounds like so (although I'm not fully convinced).
It may sounds dystopia, but addiction is a builtin feature of late stage capitalism, and it's already too late to turn around.
It’s not just social media. Externalized financialization ruins everything. Private equity firms quickly gut everything they buy from plumbers to health clinics (and you still have no choice but to buy their services because they “consolidate” the competition). It’s capitalism gone mad: financial incentives disconnected from any other considerations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...
It a seems pretty simple mistake from almost the first step:
> To get funding, you need users. To get more funding, you need exponential growth. Growth becomes the primary metric
No, you don't. This exponential user scaling theory of investment is a sickness that has taken over silicon valley and is half the reason for much of the harm we are seeing. Serve a small number users really well, build all the infra to autoscale and let the organic growth happen more slowly. Get to a bigger critical mass and you'll eventually be able to take money on your own terms. If you can't do that, you haven't waited long enough, tried hard enough, or maybe your idea just isn't what you thought it was.
Do you think a nonprofit model could work?
yes, go ahead and have ads but any income over server fees can be shared with open source projects.
Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context.
> We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.
Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior.
Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.
Behavioral addiction is real and more similar to substance addiction than you might think (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2607329/)
And they're much more different than you might think. Lets be clear. Drug addiction is mediated either directly through effecting incentive salience via dopaminergic agonism, or, indirectly through glutamergic agonism as reward eventually training incentive salience. There's no need to actually enjoy the drugs, they just directly effect the reward prediction system and alter wanting and so behavior.
Very clear causation. Very clearly outside of human volition.
Now you have screens and sounds. Very clearly not effecting incentive salience directly. Very clearly not effecting glutamergic agonism (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) directly. The only mechanism of action would be through the person actually finding the experience enjoyable repeatedly and learning to anticipate this real enjoyment. Just normal human experience. No more 'addictive' and damaging to ones life than the random interval operant conditioning of recreational fishing, and probably much less expensive.
Very abstract causation with a very weak effect. Very clearly not ouside of human volition.
And, btw, gambling disorder was grandfathered in (there are no non-substance addictions in the DSM or ICD as your article highlights at the start). Repeated calls for, and instantiations of, working groups in the DSM and ICD have covered these 'media addictions' and found the medical support wanting over and over the last 20 years. Much like uncategorizable gambling disorder would be rejected if considered these days with modern medical standards and understandings. Most of the support for these concepts come from commercial groups that profit off "treatments". It's very similar to the "gay conversion camps" model in terms of political advocacy without scientific support. But the memes for "dopamine screens" and the like have raged like wildfire among the uninformed which gives such evil for-profit groups a seeming gleen of legitimacy they definitely do not have.
If it was not clear from me addresing the points of the linked paper above, I did read the Philosophical Transactions B paper (a very low tier journal for any biology subject). In this review paper they collect a random assortment of other studies to try to say gambling disorder people's brains are similar to drug addicted people. If you've read it (then I don't know why you linked it) but you'd know they come away with no solid conclusions beyond one: gambling disorder people often have drug problems too. This does not support your argument in this context.
I recommend you check out some of the lay review articles coming out of Kent Berridge's lab: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/
so this is basically like “we couldnt raise money and this is how i rationalize it”?
Western capitalists have engineered addictions for 100s of years from forcing China to accept opium to introducing the taste of coffee to children to create demand for coffee in Japan in the future it's nothing new. Now they are doing the same with technology.
Right on.
The problem is capital. Of course many people are allergic to Marx, but the dude hit the nail on the head with his critique.
The problem is not individuals, it's a system of ownership over assets. And 99% of people will use their ownership to generate profits through hiring labor. Why? Because it's easier to have other people work for you, instead of you doing the work.
This becomes extended in the digital age beyond the original form of employees generating profit from the difference between their pay and the monetary value of their work (the original Marxist definition of profit), but also to end-users generating raw material as information for the further generation of profits through the selling of information services or plain data.
Tech has workers AND users in the formula for the generation of capital.
And if we, plebs, know this, you know the industry has already crafted their bourgeois science of this info extraction mechanism.
This monetary influence has already spread over the creation of hardware as well as software. This will follow in all of the tech-realms. They will influence the organizations that create the hardware and software specs. They will influence the law to ignore these ills. They are the creators of mass-use hardware and software.
The average end-user will live in a tech prison and the state is gonna become way more invasive. Democracy is on the line like it never has been before. They WILL use your instincts against you and they will use your data against you.
Just like capitalization has taken over every aspect of modern commodity/service production, and therefore modern life, so will data-capitalization.
There was never enshittification, it was just capital.
yep, good luck figuring out how to make a social media site that is engaging enough for people to keep coming back, able to pay its hosting bills, and just generally sustainable, without falling into the dark patterns.
If it can’t exist, should it? Or are we arguing about which color of unicorn would be the best?
In TFA… I guess he wants a government Unicorn, because surely there could be no issues with that and with strong regulation it will remain cool and competitive… everyone raves about how fucking awesome their water company is.
No matter how you slice and regulate it, the problem will always be there as long as its capitalism, which makes businesses exploit anything they operate upon.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Came here to comment this only after reading the first line!
This article thinks it's talking about problems with social media, but it's actually talking about problems with venture capitalism and economic inequality.
> Pure Intentions: Founders, like myself, genuinely want to connect people, share authentic moments, and build community. The early versions feel magical because they follow this original mission.
No. This idea that SC (or similar business cultures) want to change the world for the better is a cliche. At a certain point, after all the history of these companies, you don’t get a pure-intentions pass any more.
And in particular: I don’t believe that Zuckerberg’s motivations were ever good.
> Different Funding Methods: What if social platforms were funded like utilities or public goods instead of venture-backed and advertisement driven growth machines? Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics. Wikipedia thrives as a donation-funded cooperative. These models exist - they just don’t scale at venture-required rates.
This is good. You need to rethink the whole model. Even if that means that you don’t get to growth-hack people.
This is far better than the usual model:
1. Admit there’s a problem
2. It’s systemic
3. The fake solution: some feel-good manifesto about making X but “for humans”. But nothing about the incentives have been changed. The fundamental axiom is still there: we are entitled to make money off social media just like before, but we have a lot of words and paragraphs about doing so goodly.
The same thing happened with an attempt at making neoliberalism palpatable. “Stakeholder Capitalism”. The idea is that we just continue with neoliberalism but have a manifesto about how all stakeholders are taken into account. But nothing about the system or the power centers are changed. So you still get a corporations and their boards of directors having as much power as before.
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
I’m not sure. This seems like a half-measure. Regulating something which is inherently harmful (according to the simile) just causes more bloat.
If I’m addicted to nicotine I’m already hooked. No advertisement doesn’t help me. I already know what I want. You’re gonna make the packaging less sexy? Make me go into the Sin Section of the shop to get my fix? I’m gonna do that anyway.
What you need is an effective and mandatory opt-out option. Let me ban myself from buying these products. And provide me with alternatives (grocery shops already sell both tobacco and nicotine gum).
Give me an option to opt-out. Don’t just make a whole regulatory beast which can prey on me but one hundred checkboxes are marked and it’s very ethical and so on.
> Alternative Metrics: Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?
This would have been naive and just a loophole if the premise was to let companies keep doing their thing. They would just rebrand with fake metrics. Oh you have sent X messages this month, that means you are connecting and according to some research people who IM more are happier blah blah blah.
But this could have some merit given the previous utilities/public goods point.
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