alt Hacker NewsCan we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm.
The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.
We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.
Replies
> These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do
I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.
Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.
I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.
I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable- there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are definitely possible.
They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking something good and making it shitty is one way to make money doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.