> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
A Quick Gemini query tells me that FB's global revenue averages $1/mo per DAU, and $5/mo for US-only. So that gives us a benchmark for how much we'd have to charge to make it work out. I figure a couple of bucks per month, per user would be plenty to make a lot of money and provide a good, non-addictive service.
If we wanted to get funding, we could use that to subsidize it (disclosed up-front) for the first million or so users. We could just tell people that it's free for the first 12 months, and then $2/mo after that or whatever. No credit card or other barriers up front. Then it would be up to us to provide a product useful (but not addictive) enough to convince people to stay past the 12 month mark.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
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”?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
addiction drives revenue but isn't the only model .monetize outcomes: charge writing tools per export, focus apps per session, design tools per final asset .soak in usage decay : session lengths shrink unless reengaged .let users set caps, pick 'read-only' or 'close-friends' modes .in social apps, rank by saves/comments, not scroll time .monetize filters, advanced DM settings, creator tools .intentional use stays high, manipulation drops .i want to build something like this someday lets see
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.
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..
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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?
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. 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.
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...
Any communist country of your preference.
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.
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.
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.
Over human history the best system we have come up with and implemented to ensure this has been capitalism. Nothing else has come close
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
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.
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...
> 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.
And businesses as a whole produce positive externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to allow them to exist.
> 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.
Voting obviously doesn’t work. Troll
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.
Only when accounting is done without calculating ecological cost, including human quality of life.
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.
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.
It’s a question of time horizon.
...go on.
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?
Would you put your money into a business which put common good above your return on investment?
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.
100% agreed, well put
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.
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
> 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!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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
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...
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?
I'm not raising money to prevent this for my new social network.
https://wonderful.dev/download
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
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
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.
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.
“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
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?
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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.
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.
A Quick Gemini query tells me that FB's global revenue averages $1/mo per DAU, and $5/mo for US-only. So that gives us a benchmark for how much we'd have to charge to make it work out. I figure a couple of bucks per month, per user would be plenty to make a lot of money and provide a good, non-addictive service.
If we wanted to get funding, we could use that to subsidize it (disclosed up-front) for the first million or so users. We could just tell people that it's free for the first 12 months, and then $2/mo after that or whatever. No credit card or other barriers up front. Then it would be up to us to provide a product useful (but not addictive) enough to convince people to stay past the 12 month mark.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, or do you carry a feature phone?
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.
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.
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.> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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'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.
Changing the Accessibility settings on my iPhone to make the whole screen grayscale also does the same thing for me.
Can you use Android Auto with it? Props for the change
Camera and video calls feels like two major drawbacks. Also I've heard there are NFC problems.
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
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”?
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.
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
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
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.
> 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.
so this is basically like “we couldnt raise money and this is how i rationalize it”?
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.
> 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.
> This isn't because founders are evil
Sounds like something an evil founder would say
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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."
addiction drives revenue but isn't the only model .monetize outcomes: charge writing tools per export, focus apps per session, design tools per final asset .soak in usage decay : session lengths shrink unless reengaged .let users set caps, pick 'read-only' or 'close-friends' modes .in social apps, rank by saves/comments, not scroll time .monetize filters, advanced DM settings, creator tools .intentional use stays high, manipulation drops .i want to build something like this someday lets see
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.
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.
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.
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.