A shared experience maintaining its integrity is important to many people, more than most would realize or care to admit. It's not just about competition.

Well put! Weight cheating existed even before Zwift embraced racing and it was despised just as much.

That's not widely applicable. Many people enjoy competing in business for example.

Those people are generally sick in the head, and ruin things for everyone else. Endless growth and competition are objectively killing the planet. Seeking wealth for the sake of comparison to others misses all of the reasons life is worth living.

As long as the population of the planet continues to grow we're going to need to grow the availability of resources.

If anything improved productivity and efficiency is going save the planet from the current status quo.

Better productivity comes about through competition in carefully regulated markets[1].

For example, Shoichiro Toyoda deciding to compete with incumbent car companies by using resources and energy more efficiently.

Calling those that want to compete to find a better way to do things "generally sick in the head" isn't really helpful.

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1. Regulated farming for example doesn't use DDT any more even though it's cheap and good at killing pests. It's far too damaging and poisonousness tso we force farmers to find alternatives.

Perhaps you shouldn't be commenting on the 'Startup News' website, then?

('Startup News' was the title before it changed to 'Hacker News'.)

“Startup” doesn’t equate endless growth and competition. Building a (merely) sustainable business is a worthy goal and quite good enough. Most startups never even reach that modest goal.

What you described is what's called a 'lifestyle business', not a startup.

See eg http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html and https://www.ycombinator.com/library/En-what-is-a-startup

This is a website that discusses more than just "startup news", so perhaps not

And in cycling.