So for example people in a co-op or volunteer org can be bad for reasons other than profit, like power or the illusion of regard instead.
But then a few days ago at a family gathering a guy asked what I do, and as part of that I was explaining what open source is, and he on his own started telling me how much he loved the vlc media player. Everything he loved about it was the result of the fact that no one working on it has any reason to mistreat the user.
There are examples of open source software that makes decicions I don't like, but even the worst of those are someone else's legitimate best idea how to do the best possible for the user.
Yes, Reddit's current actions are squarely the result of capitalism, not "people".
It’s simple. The profit motive ruins everything as things get big. Usually because shareholders demand to extract rents from the ecosystem. Even while externalizing the cost to society and the environment
Open source gift economies are a far better alternative for society and don’t have that problem. But they require the productive participants to enjoy financial independence or some disposable free time, and universal basic income isn’t coming from daddy government anytime soon.
If you want to attract infrastructure providers and fund development for your project in an economically sustainable way, don’t sell shares in your corporation - release a utility token for your platform, and make it available worldwide. Heck, peg it to a USDC if you’re worried about speculators or complying with securities laws (although there are tons of exemptions from registration, like Reg D and Reg S and Reg CF etc). Issuing and managing them with smart contracts is super easy, and permissionless. You can do it in a minute. People have their own choice of how to store them. And micropayments for infrastructure can be implemented via trustlines in a free market pretty easily.
The utility token holders — even the people who hoard them — have a far better set of incentives than corporate shareholders do. Ether or Filecoin HODLers aren’t trying to ruin it for everyone using the network, nor are they even trying to assert central control over what people can do with IPFS or Ethereum!
Sadly, many people on HN have it completely backwards with what’s good for society. They hate Web3 with a passion and claim it has no use cases even though utility tokens would lead to a far superior set of incentives, wifh no parasitic shareholder class insisting on centralized control and rent extraction — essentially forever. They see what happens at Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, with a few people at the top making decisions, but they don’t put two-and-two together because the cargo-cult of anti-Web3 is strong in 2023. (But not next year, when the halving event happens and lots of innovation gets released again.)
Meanwhile they are in love with generative AI, the new kid on the block, despite most of its own most prominent inventors screaming about a large chance of catastrophe and running to the governmebf.
That just about sums it up right there. Doing the same thing over and over (shareholder capitalism) and expecting a different result after the platform gets big. Calling daddy government. Bitterly complaining. But to acknowledge the root cause and an actual solution of programmers enabling decentralization? Nah, that smells like web3! Don’t subject me to this decentralized nonsense! Brrrr
By the way, the reaction of those who were used to centralized control has always been priceless… this is the earliest moment when they were confronted with the possibility of everyone empowered to do their own thing on their own personal computers:
The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher protocol was a disaster, “literally the worst meeting I’ve ever seen,” says Alberti. “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”
Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. While it did everything the U required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger. “You’re not supposed to have written this!” Alberti says of the group’s reaction. “This is some lark, never do this again!” The Gopher team was forbidden from further work on the protocol. (https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...)
Times change, the hilarity of resisting decentralization stays the same…
That's the wrong way to look at it. Try to step out of the cargo-cult for just a second. Shareholders buying an IPO is hyper-capitalism. You have a market of buyers and sellers, say, and some utility token. Maybe it's FileCoin for file storage on IPFS. Maybe it's ETH for gas on Ethereum. It's global and convenient to pay once you have it. Maybe it's Disney Dollars.
But then, you have on top of this "hyper-capitalism". Peter Thiel says "competition is for losers, build a monopoly", making many capitalists blush. Venture Capitalists prop up money-losing unit economics for years (they call it "reducing friction") and then dump the equity on the public. The public then pushes the team to extract rents from all sides from the marketplace forever. Who needs these shareholders? That's hyper-capitalism.
In fact, I would even go so far as to say that your utility token shouldn't be freely available to everyone. Only the actual participants should be buying it. Otherwise a hyper-capitalist whale like Goldman Sachs can pump and dump it, hurting people: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/27/how-goldman-sachs-creat...
It might even be designed to undergo demurrage, so that if you don't use it, you gradually lose it. This was done in Worgl and defied the depression all around it, even the Mises institute had to gradully agree it worked: https://mises.org/library/free-money-miracle
