A bloated payroll to support a bloated advertising platform with a bloated AI-based recommendation algorithm when all it should be doing is loading a descending-order list of most recent submissions meeting the category criteria....
Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted
The hosting and bandwidth costs of images and especially video is non-trivial. I agree that the vast majority of the costs of these overly-large companies comes from what happens while trying to make them profitable, and then all of the engineering work that goes into that... but that all starts because running the site in the first place wasn't free and you have to do something to make them at least sustainable, with your "obvious" options being to either: 1) ask for donations (which likely won't pay for the site if you get popular: I know this from experience); 2) require people to pay some small subscription fee (which will make the site less fun for everyone); 3) pray ubiquitous micropayments eventually happens (i work on this problem as part of Orchid, but it still hasn't happened ;P); 4) sell "something else" to whales, like t-shirts or the ability to "guild" messages (the strategies reddit was trying to do as they resisted ads for a long time... maybe these work well enough?); or 5) start trying to sell ads and become the thing you hate. The only other strategies I have seen tend to either drag you towards #5 or simply cause other dark patterns, such as taking a cut of "tips" (what TikTok and Twitch do), which at bare minimum incentivizes the "don't you dare talk about alternative payment systems in our ecosystem: all payments must go through us" model sin (which can be fought against if you have a lot of willpower and remain private--I never required this with Cydia as I considered it the original sin my entire market existed to undermine--but I see the motivation and it feels kind of inevitable). I personally bet the only real "correct" solution is essentially #3... if we ever get to the point where the fees for that are as easy to pay and as low as the fees you pay for electricity (which works on a similar model).
How about running ads but not letting them dominate your product? I see nothing wrong with running a costs-plus business model but VC comes in and demand all these stupid companies dominate the world so they can get their 500x return or whatever. Then they go public and now the only thing that matters is shareholder value, fuck the users and OG supporters...
Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and it ends up getting perverted into the hellscape that is tech today. Every damn time.
Its really really hard for a company whose ultimate goal is profit, to give up opportunities to do so. Its just not gonna happen. You can have all the ethical people you want, but people change and it takes just one "smart" engineer/product manager to realize how much money is on the table, then use that to grab power and get the same changes everywhere.
Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.
I don't think it's hard per-se. I think it's hard if you have investors.
I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employees, in order to have a company which doesn't actively psychologically harm its users, a less stressful working environment.
Gumroad is the perfect example of this.
The problems come from VC money, which force a company to chase 500x returns or die trying. More in general, whenever there is centralisation of resources, problems ensue at some point later on.
Regulations are not the answer - established companies find a way to arginate them (look at Google playing with cookies), smaller companies trying to go live and compete have a slower time to market and die, benefiting the established companies.
On top of this regulations introduce a different set of problems.
What if I'm okay being on a website which doesn't respect my privacy? What if I care more about reading a news article and never visit that website again more than I care about them respecting some rules regarding what kind of tracking they do?
Instead of assuming we, the lawmakers, are omniscient and perfect, I think we should just get out of the way of the market and limit governmental influence to reduce the number of monopolies and corruption that gets into the real world - and then bubbles up in various ways, chasing infinte growth being one of them.
> Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls.
Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
I get that, but there is something very wrong with business culture if that is the only outcome guaranteed. There are lots of examples of successful companies whose business model is not based around the unrestrained pursuit of pure profit at the expense of customers... look at Nintendo, for example, or Disney.
