The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value".
Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption.
I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.
>The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns [...]
VCs are not the root cause. You're not looking hard enough for counterexamples.
Examples of software companies that didn't take VC money that many consider to be "user hostile" are:
- Intuit -- see 1-star reviews on Amazon of annual Quicken releases and forced upgrades of buggy software that nobody wants
- Autodesk -- expensive licensing and stagnant features and bug fixes in Revit, 3ds Max, etc
- Microsoft -- list of various user complaints over decades are well known [pedantic alert: MS took a little bit of VC money from David F. Marquardt but they didn't need it because they were already profitable with cash in the bank; they just wanted DFM as an advisor for their upcoming IPO]
The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs.
You can't blame VCs for that.
The real problem here is excessive governmental tolerance of monopolies and the lack of an adequate regulatory/legal regime to protect end-users from harms caused by vendor-lock in.
All of the companies you mention have near-monopolies in their respective sectors. Hundreds of years of economic history show that monopolies are extremely harmful to their customers.
Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets.
Microsoft continues to be a problem because the US government decided, 25 years ago, that stopping Microsoft from abusing its operating system monopoly was unAmerican.
Companies, like people, follow incentives. The incentives created by strong copyright and patent law, combined with the deliberate unenforcement of anti-trust laws in the United States, prevent competition. Without competition, customers always lose.
Getting users a fair deal means changing the rules that define the software market to consider the needs of users rather than only the wants of vendors.
Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets.
The main competition for Autodesk's Fusion 360 is SolidWorks. It's possible, although not that easy, to get models back and forth.[1]
There's FreeCAD. There are many low end 2D CAD programs. If you're building something bigger than a house or more complicated than a keyboard, though, you probably want a pro product.
FreeCAD likely helps Autodesk's position - when freecad is so crap, you will likely just pay for autocad/or/other than even looking at alternatives, because you have been already so frustrated.
Constructive solid geometry is hard, but it's all math. User interfaces for 3D CAD are very hard. Open source is terrible at hard user interfaces. Hence, no really good free 3D CAD.
Who exactly is suffering because of Microsoft? Surely not the normal users, Macs are expensive and Linux is garbage outside the tech crowd's needs (a big shock considering who it services). There's plenty of competition in cloud development, office software, and system administration as well. The only losers are European style mom and pop scale businesses but those are relics of a bygone time (probably why Europe likes them). Where's the damage?
Everyone is overpaying because of Microsoft's monopolies.
Office + Windows + Active Directory + Windows Server is the only viable enterprise-level software stack for white collar office work. There is no real competition in this space and, as a monopoly, Microsoft charges accordingly.
Microsoft's monopoly pricing is passed down to every business' customers and, ultimately, extracts money from all of our pockets.
I don't even see how European style mom and pop scale businesses even suffered because of Microsoft. On the contrary, the adoption of Windows is much higher in Europe than it is in the US, understandably so. I doubt there are businesses outside of tech anywhere outside the US based on the MacOS. And because Microsoft took a reaaaally lax attitude towards copyright enforcement, everyone in the old and developing worlds basically pirated Windows, Office, etc to oblivion.
In my books, post the antitrust case against it in 95, Microsoft has been the least monopolistic of the bunch, and a net positive to the rest of the world.
> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money.
At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed, and if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it.
That's not to say that there aren't valid complaints about the availability and usability of free software.
There are some free applications that can do amazing things, but are genuinely less intuitive than comparable commercial software. It's not surprising that users who aren't free software diehards don't want to use these tools.
There are also entire ecosystems where free software just isn't a thing, e.g. phone software and hosted user services.
That's not sustainable. Most OSS nowadays is produced by big companies looking at OSS as a way to retain or capture more engineering talent.
It somehow works for small individuals because having a nice github can be useful to get a job or bypass the ridiculous interviewing process of the day.
A few heroes barely live off donations from wealthy companies and patreons, others sell development courses on the side.
The real problem is that companies in our society grow too much and we end up with a few outliers companies and hordes of employees. Unfortunately, as soon as a company gets money or becomes successful enough to lobby the government for more regulations, they can effectively make it harder for competitor to pop up. The fact that starting a business is a logistic hassle because of corporate taxes is another barrier.
I'd like to see more micro companies and individuals providing value to society instead of giant corporations.
OSS can be a part of that, but it doesn't have to be.
The parent comment was specifically talking about free software, not open source software. The latter is commonly produced by large companies, but the former is much rarer.
> At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed
Sorry, but this is laughable. Instead of self-serving greed, you have self-serving "what interests the person writing it." That leaves us with open source software that has horrible user interfaces and is every bit as user-hostile as for-pay software. (For example, see the recent arguments about git's UI in this thread[0].)
Except that for free software, "the person writing it" is not preventing anyone else from being "the person writing it" so anyone with criticisms is directed to apply time or money to solving the problem they're complaining about. Because unlike proprietary software, you can actually do that.
This doesn't work well for UI improvements for a very specific reason, which is that most of the UI criticisms of free software are about how it's difficult to learn rather than how it's difficult to use after you've learned it. So by the time you've spent the effort to learn the existing UI well enough to know what changes to make to it, you no longer have a personal incentive to make it easier to learn, because you've already paid the time cost of learning it.
But that isn't user-hostile, it's newbie-hostile, which is different. In particular it means that if you're willing to put in the time to get over the hump, you end up with software that actually does exactly what you want, even if the incantations to get it to do that aren't always initially intuitive.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" -- Misattributed
> horrible user interfaces and is every bit as user-hostile as for-pay software
This statement is laughable. A poorly designed UI is not equivalent to a UI filled with dark patterns. I was asserting that free software is a known solution to user-hostile software, not a solution to bad UI.
Do you really think being confused about how to rebase in git is the same as being tricked into creating an online Microsoft account instead of a local account when installing Windows? Or being tricked into buying some TurboTax add-on that you didn't want or need, and can't refund without wasting 2 hours on the phone?
The solution to the git problem is to read the documentation. Nobody is actively trying to prevent you from solving your problem, the designers are just bad at UI design. The solution to Microsoft's problem is to realize that it's intentionally user-hostile, and you have to find a workaround that they don't want you to use, like temporarily disconnecting from the internet. The solution to the TurboTax problem is to just be vigilant and paranoid and exhausted at all times.
The git situation is unfortunate. The Microsoft and TurboTax situations are stupid user-hostile bullshit. They're not even remotely equivalent.
I'm going to stick to my principles and continue working to create the software future that I actually prefer. I won't tell you to "just fork it and fix it yourself" like some other people might -- you're free to take the short term perspective if you prefer. You're free to laugh at me and others if you prefer.
But in the long run, your perspective is wrong. Free software is like a steamroller. It's slow, but it's slow because the people building it observe what's being built around them and tend to take the longer route of building it correctly rather than just cranking out whatever makes investors happy.
In the long run, the git UI will be improved, or an better replacement will turn up. Microsoft's telemetry, on the other hand, will never go away.
The Git UI will probably never be "improved" because it makes sense to people who understand how Git works rather than pasting command lines they found online, and the few real warts like status output telling you to use "git pull", which is a mistake in the workflows most people use, are too old and entrenched.
If you look at the discussions on the mailing list, you'll see people care a lot and make thoughtful decisions about the user experience, it just isn't aimed at the people for whom no possible user interface change would be helpful, because they don't know what's going on and don't read documentation.
I mostly agree with you, but it was just the example that the parent comment used. The same could apply to the GIMP or Inkscape or Blender or FreeCAD or ... (etc.)
This is empirically false. Git has added commands solely for the purpose of improved usability via git reset and git switch. Neither of these add new capabilities to git and were instead added to provide clarity.
I think, personally, that it's because only the most iconoclastic individuals are willing to put in the effort to make truly free software (like MIT licensed, for example) since they have the raw, unfettered drive (based on their hatred of the mainstream) required to work through the years of programming for zero monetary returns that it takes to produce a feature-complete software project that does something worthwhile.
I believe we could partially solve this problem if we could better support the work-a-day developer with a great idea, who either doesn't have the risk profile to quit their job or doesn't have the free time to slave away in their home after their normal job. These people tend to be the programmer/engineer who worked in one or several companies in a similar industry, has seen the mistakes and insights from each, and can visualize a better data structure for a common operation in this industry, or perhaps even a new operational model that works more efficiently for optimizing some common problem.
However, those developers just don't have the incentive/drive/motivation to do it, and usually that's because their method of survival is to sell their time to another person/corporation in exchange for money that can be used to buy food, shelter, etc. and thus they are too tired, too demotivated, or perhaps they just want to spend some time with their family and friends. Whatever the reason, if you allow them some more of their free time to work on other stuff, these developers will come up with amazing things. There is an argument that some make about the "laziness" of developers who can't do a job and become a CEO of a startup and have a family, but why insinuate or argue that they're too lazy and unworthy when we could un-block their "laziness" and get great results for humanity? (My view is that no one is "lazy", just that some people have a higher "activation energy", but once they are "activated" most people will work as hard as the next.)
Also, I personally think software serving the interests of one person is going to be generally better than software serving the interests of greed, but I have no evidence, just a feeling from my life experiences.
No clue why you're downvoted because you are spot on.
The constant hustle culture is extremely toxic. We don't live to work. And indeed making something of value requires a significant investment of energy. That shouldn't come for free and shouldn't be expected of the "community" to always play catch up with big and dedicated -- and very handsomely paid -- development teams in a corporation.
> At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software.
Imho, that's not the solution to the problem mentioned by GP. One needs to control self-serving greed, not give everything for free. I still need to live from something, but I don't need to earn six-figure numbers.
I agree that software can be free, if you happen to find people who support the idea behind it. But that doesn't happen that often. What does work for me is that everything I write in my sparetime is freely available. It's like other people do volunteering work.
This type of thinking has been a huge motivator to my side project as I try to envision what a more user-centric internet could look like. The core being self-hosted internet infrastructure--my project being an open-source, easy-to-run, _private_ blog. https://simpleblogs.org
Of course the situation is far better than with proprietary software, but there is plenty of free software that has user hostile privacy violations. For one example (Cura), the only reason the authors fixed the issue is that the GDPR forced them to do so. Most people don't have the skills one would need to discover nor fix these issues.
R.e. "external" pressures. This explanation does not seem very efficient. There are tangible benefits to wealth accumulation. Wealth can afford its owner many kinds of different pleasures that are less available to the less wealthy. It also protects from many harms. All organisms in existence are avaricious to some extent or another, because the ancestral environment favors this trait.
There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill.
Never mind the loss of online privacy.
The problem is that raising these as the real issues they are puts you outside the dominant ideology.
If you don't do it anonymously you are in real danger of discrimination during job searches. And if you do it forcefully and polemically enough - to the point where you start getting an activist audience instead an audience of passive click-consumers you can monetise - you'll attract more direct forms of attention.
Humans are avaricious, but humans are not only avaricious. Our ability to cooperate and to look after each other is one of the key evolutionary developments that led to to our success as a species.
From this point view neoliberalism, nationalism, and other competitive/extractive ideologies are an unwelcome return to dumb competitive animality. Some individuals win big, but the species as a whole damages its long-term survival prospects - literally and eventually very tangibly.
> There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill.
These all seem like things wealth protects from, which helps explain why founders and all other humans will tend to want to accumulate it.
This sounds to me like Silicon Valley solutionism. Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures and the many other effects of global heating. [1]
When that happens I'd say it's only a matter of time before the pitchforks and guillotines come out...
“I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
Could be that vast crop failures in the US end up being a problem some day but the problem seems somewhat remote. Anyway, nobody claimed wealth protects from all possible bad things. That doesn't really do anything to diminish its attractiveness for preventing the things it does prevent.
>Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures
How are crop failures a major problem if an area doesn't have a substantial amount of subsistence farmers and does have reasonably free trade? How could they threaten a developed economy without crop failures everywhere?
> How are crop failures a major problem if an area doesn't have a substantial amount of subsistence farmers and does have reasonably free trade?
Would you be able to rephrase your question to help meet my need for clarity? Maybe you could state your position without it being a question? At the moment it is not clear to me what you are asking.
> How could they threaten a developed economy without crop failures everywhere?
An example is migration. If large areas of land continue to be plundered and made infertile [1] by Global North corporations (or 'developed' countries' as you call them), by imposing harmful industrial agriculture practices then the inhabitants of those countries will have to migrate to other areas.
So we, as inhabitants of the Global North and members of the 1% wealthiest in the world (as everyone on Hackernews is), would do well to integrate Global South perspectives.
"We are currently facing the most severe migration crisis in history. But this is only one dimension of a broader civilizational crisis. Thus, anti-racist movements should not focus solely on issues of human mobility rights, but also build new paths of solidarity with societies in the geopolitical Global South. A new perspective on internationalism is necessary, where people of the North and the South co-operate to overcome the current colonial division of nature and labor, as well as what has been called the imperial mode of living. In this sense, it is important to question the dominant notions of what it means to live a good life, to think global when it comes to social welfare and to link up with movements such as eco-feminism or degrowth. Doing so could open up new possibilities to address fears of social relegation due to immigration, as they exist in the Global North."
This sounds like another way of saying widespread subsistence farming is a problem, which was essentially my point, not that it is strictly only a problem within national borders. If people have jobs, and make money, and buy food instead of growing it, then they don't face starvation because of crop failures and don't have to migrate. You seem to be opposed to "industrial agricultural practices", that I'd assumed were by definition the solution to the problem.
What sort of "root cause" analysis goes for the human nature of a founders? Yikes, are we that overly-focused on the individual?
Let my say the obvious, all those non-VC companies are publicly held. So let me get to the heart of the matter, if you have investors, they will demand returns on their investment. And if you don't have investors, you will have to compete externally (e.g. users) and internally (e.g. salaries) with those that do.
I.e. if you want to survive, the market will keep you in lockstep with the worst of your competitors on the market. So ultimately it still boils down to "problems of unconstrained markets".
VCs are here both symbolic of a system that seeks outsized returns and the catalysts of that system. VC funding is the accepted model for startup success and it's very difficult to find advice on starting a serious startup that doesn't anticipate VC-style backing. As a result, it's become the norm and an obvious starting point. Capturing the culture of early-stage startups in this way has lead to a monoculture where even communities like Indie Hackers advocates for VC funding[0]. VCs aren't literally the problem but they represent and reinforce the broken status-quo.
I'm interested in the properties of the system we've created and participate in and so this is a generalized observation. There are always counterexamples to generalisations but that's not to say that there isn't something valuable about the generalisation itself. I'm not arguing that without VCs founders would be perfect altruists but there could be other funding models that create fewer conflicts of interest between producers and consumers of technology.
FWIW you can address all of your criticisms by expanding the problem from VCs to non-founder investors generally. All of your examples are publicly-traded companies.
> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that.
I'm not sure this one fits, because the universities are between a rock and a hard place. They've switched to "video instruction" but none of their expenses have gone away because they're still maintaining a campus and about the same level of staffing since they expect to switch back to it in the not too distant future. But if their costs haven't gone down, it's pretty hard for them to charge less without going under.
I have seen professors mention that their prep time has multiplied since they are now producing lectures rather than giving them live. They now need to deal with video production, remote homework and test submissions and returns, live lecture production, tech issues, etc.
Although I definitely feel for students, because prices for education are just insane in general. We should not be forcing debt upon our young people. But both professors and students are along for the tough ride.
The issue is the veneer behind these IoT, Social media, Internet time wasters, and occasional productivity boosters are wearing off.
There is no competition (less VC money) to serve the community better and the real reason for these companies existing remains bare. All they want to do is monitor you, manipulate you, get your money, and kill your productivity.
The user always will lose outside of the occasional paragdim shift or productivity boost. As it stands now there is no vision to change existing platforms thus in this age the user will always lose.
There is no reason to contribute anything to the online sphere (outside of technical areas) as it is like pissing in the wind.
Microsoft Office has become much better and more popular since they started focusing on subscriptions and they don’t have to keep forcing more useless features to convince people to upgrade.
Office 365 is a great deal for $99 - 6 users each with 1TB of storage and I can use it with my iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows PC etc.
I don’t agree on your “user hostile” examples outside of Intuit but agree with your take —- founders know what VC is. The reason they started the company in the first place is to get rich.
I think the worker co-op model has a lot of potential for tech startups. They're more stable than other ownership models, and the desires of the workers tend to be more aligned with consumers than the consumers are with investors (and obviously a worker co-op is far more aligned with the desires of the workers).
The primary advantage of venture capital is access to capital for growth, which isn't a great fit for purely digital companies with low capital requirements and the ability to bootstrap. The ability to rapidly grow is handy, but primarily addresses the needs of investors, who make their money off of growth. Getting investors to satisfy the needs of investors is awfully circular.
The big reason we don't see tech co-ops is simply tradition. Most big tech companies were VC funded. Most good startup advice comes out of VC companies like YC that naturally push people towards venture capital. On the flip side, worker owned co-ops are most common in the food industry of all things, even though that is quite capital intensive, because of the same sort of tradition-inertia.
This is exactly the kind of thinking we need. We've been blinded to possibilities like these because of dogma and tradition but maybe it's time to seriously explore alternatives.
Does anyone know any tech ecosystems/communities promoting a worker co-op model?
Always wish we talked more about Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), in the US. Maybe there is a startup idea in making this type of program easier to implement, like Stripe Atlas for employee ownership. Imagine, further, if our tax law incentivized this type of ownership structure instead of incentivizing dividends and capital gains.
> Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world.
What's scarce isn't software, it's time. For certain classes of products (specifically, those with network effects), getting earlier to a larger market can be the difference between a company worth billions and a company that goes bankrupt. What 2005-2015 VC tries to do is to inject funding into companies specifically so that they can go on massive hiring sprees and try to capture the market before any of their competitors.
> The VC model for funding technology...
This is the root of your misconception. VC doesn't fund technology, it funds growth. It's not the same thing. Sometimes it correlates, where technology is what permits previously-impossible growth to happen, but it's not the same thing.
> VC is ripe for disruption.
No, what you're seeing is a classic bubble. The success of early Silicon Valley VC funds like Sequoia and A18Z came from understanding that VC funds growth, not technology. Today you look at the funding landscape and you see thousands of sources for "VC" funding by people who think that any technology will lend itself to massive scale and growth, and most of those efforts fail miserably, particularly the ones where there are no network effects or other barriers to entry and the businesses eventually commoditize. At which point, it's very clear - if you sell a commodity, and you're not yet a Fortune 500-sized enterprise, then from a VC expectations point of view, you failed.
If you want to fund technology - really fund technology - then advocate for better public funding of research. Only state-level governments can afford to put funding into research projects that will have a 20+-year horizon from idea to commercially-ready product. There are well-established pipelines for taking academic research with commercial applications and turning them into profitable companies.
I interpret what you mean as "VC model" as investment bets that are essentially high risk / high return. A high return play would be one that envisions dominance in a $1B plus market, and high risk play is say a 5% chance that you see your money back. How does "high return" mess up UX? If I understand the "Lurking" review, it would be by focusing on skeevey attention/reward patterns to habituate interaction in online communities. That seems like a narrow case for your broad claim. I also don't understand the "scarcity and under-production" bits.
That said, disrupting the "VC model" seems like an interesting question. The implication for me would be many more bets that are lower risk / more marginal returns. An IPO or buying stock would fit that profile, but that's small amount of opportunities overall and there's nothing disruptive about that. For me, an example of something different might be community-focused investing. Pick a region or town as a locus of investing, and invest in a number of existing business and infrastructure all across the broad, with the idea of moving that local instance of an economic system from a static phase to a growth phase. That has nothing to do with tech, per se. Maybe that's the disruption ...
No, the problem is centralization and consolidation. The same sad story of the Internet was mirrored in the film industry, without the VC model at all. Disney owns basically everything and they've largely killed off the broad spectrum of film genres in favour of Marvel / Star Wars tent-pole spectacle.
Centralization of economic (as well as political) power is the true killer of consumer freedom. It occurs so regularly that it's difficult to imagine any possibility of escape.
I was going to say this seems factually untrue, because the number of films released each year has been going up for a long time, but there are some interesting parallels on how films are distributed. Looking at https://stephenfollows.com/how-many-films-are-released-each-..., the number of films released has gone way up over time, but the number of films in wide-release has gone done.
The internet has more content then ever, but the long tail of content there is consumed at a smaller rate relative to the big 3/5/100 web properties.
The problem isn't that consumer freedom has been killed- after all, all those films and content exist and likely more accessible than ever, its that the large centralized firms have managed to largely satisfy the majority of consumer demand without it. If I have the time to see a movie (a rare occurrence sadly) and Disney has a Marvel or Star Wars movie out, I'll just go see that, even if there might be a limited showing of a comedy-western-crime genre film out that I'd enjoy even more.
Note, I am concerned about media consolidation, but its more about distribution and IP ownership at this point than consumer choice.
Facebook (IPO 2012), Google(IPO 2004), Microsoft (IPO 1986) or Disney (IPO 1946) don't need an exit, yet they are prime examples of centralization and consolidation.
I also think there's a lot to be tried in the space of "how to build technology companies". I see many options available to technology companies that are not realistic for traditional companies. I think that we need to experiment with legal frameworks for technology companies the same way we experimented with licenses for software for this potential to be fulfilled.
Here's a perhaps weird take that I'm not convinced of myself, but it's interesting food for thought. Maybe the big companies pay so well the floor is just that high.
Let's say you, a hopeful founder, could get $0.5M/yr at a BigCo. Instead you're going to start a company where you'll earn maybe $0.15M/yr for a decade then either get a payout (10%) or fail (90%). To make them even in expectation after that decade, you need $5M = $1.5M + 10% * payout, so payout = $35M. Maybe you and your cofounder each have 25% (?) of the company at that point , so the valuation needs to be 4x that $35M, so $140M.
To take a paycut from a really good alternative, you need a giant incentive. Maybe that just means that if you would start a business that'll "only" make you $0.5-1M/year if you succeed, then in solely a financial perspective, you should just join a BigCo.
Well, as someone who just left a 750k USD a year at a FAANG with a clear path to making 2MM+ in 5 years or so, I disagree.
I am in my early 30s and have a wife and kids. At some point, your relationship with money changes. I am now more concerned about my own legacy and the example I’m giving my kids than whether my net worth in 10 years will be 2 or 20 million.
I’m also more deliberate about how I use my time. So I’m perfectly content in doing something that will net me “only” 250k or so a year.
The irony is that this might net me more if I decide to come back to a FAANG in the future.
> I am in my early 30s and have a wife and kids. At some point, your relationship with money changes. I am now more concerned about my own legacy and the example I’m giving my kids than whether my net worth in 10 years will be 2 or 20 million.
Narator: The median wealth of a 30-35 year old American is $30k.
I think you're scapegoating VC's for normal business practices. The consumer/producer relationship for internet services is distorted by the freemium model. The free access drives consolidation on the best early contender. Once companies have attained a significant amount of market share they can do pretty much anything that they want in regards to user experience. This is particularly important where the magnitude of the user network is directly correlated to the quality of the product. The reciprocity of the consumer/producer relationship dissolves and the network of users can be subjected to major changes without a feasible option for recourse.
This is basically localized forms of market monopolization. The internet is always pro-producer because the user has very little influence in the relationship.
Can we not just say it's greed? "Some people are greedy" and leave it at that? In a sufficiently small and self-governing community, that kind of asshole would be sanctioned, exiled or killed. In a large industrialized society that can't reach any consensus whatsoever on any issue except that economic growth is essential, and that makes that growth its sole unassailable objective, you will get user-hostile software, not to mention user-hostile police, user-hostile employers, user-hostile government, medicine, education, you name it.
IMHO we can't just say that. Because nothing is stopping us users from paying for email, online document storage, blogs, etc. It would appear to me that greed is one cause, and an unrealistic expectation that infrastructure should be free, or at least an all-you-can-eat buffet, is another cause.
It's a good point; we can't really escape the fact that it costs "effort" to do things that create "benefit".
Although if I still stubbornly try to view this through the prism of greed, I note that it doesn't necessarily fall apart. Like maybe a user's wanting something for free is a form of greed, and the company that bases its business model around that, is really just turning that greed to its own advantage kind of like an aikido master throwing you ass over tit using mostly your own energy!
Mind you I don't want to imply or pretend I considered any of this ahead of time or intended it as part of my GP comment.
We can, but the people on this forum tend to like trying to solve problems. There's no solution to "some people are greedy" besides mass-murder or reframing the problem in ways that assume people will be greedy.
> a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place
The great thing about the free market is anybody can create a company in whatever framework they like.
For example, the D Language Foundation. We don't make money, it's pretty much all volunteers and support from industry. We don't "extract" any value from our users.
The open source ecosystem, being primarily about source code, doesn't have any particular answer for how to charge for hardware or for services. Sometimes you get free hosting, but the organization will be making money another way.
Disruption requires inefficiencies/skirtable regulations in the existing system. In this case the system is capitalism itself.
As long as software development and user acquisition requires capital, software doesn’t seem all that different from other capital intensive activities.
IMO this will change when
1. Regulations and/or cultural norms inhibit user-hostile behavior.
Regulation could go a long way, e.g. tax incentives for open source development or using open standard/platforms. Imagine giving developers or companies lower tax rates on profits from open source products, e.g. for resulting donation income.
That way they could operate cheaper and could pass the savings in tax on to users or investors. For clients this would be nice too, they could reduce the risk of being locked in when choosing a provider and shouldn’t care as long as it’s not their core business.
The challenge would be preventing misuse and how to get countries to give away tax income that other countries might use.
The behemoths are already based upon open source tech and have contributed to it. But what they make on top of it neither has its "schema" (software sufficient to fork your own) open nor the instances accessible or communicatable. The same way that installing Linux doesn't mean I can access your files or configurations on top of them. The way I see it that is a price of open source software that you can't control how others use it in exchange for not being controlled.
Open standards as positive externalities would be a rational reason for tax discounts even if the value of it varies greatly - although good for repairs few would care for a specific printer model's firmware as it is so specific in its domain.
Venture Captital is not the same as capitalism. In fact, you could argue that the hyper-growth pro-monopoly attitudes of VC firms is decidedly anti-capitalist in as much as they are anticompetitive behaviours.
Arguing that the current system is the only one that will work, regardless of how broken it is, is a very dangerous position to advocate for and an anti-pattern that would eventually lead us away from a fair and equal marketplace. That's not capitalism.
I'm old enough to remember when you could start a business by going down to the bank and borrowing money with a 5 year term. The problem is you can't play in a winner take all market with a slow steady growth model any longer. The multi national monopoly with a stake closest to your business model will just crush you for fun.
This results in new ideas being go big or go home. May as well not play unless you're going to over borrow and try to grow so fast that you corner the market over night. Once you get the market cornered though, you gotta pay back that loan.
It would be rad if there was enough pie for people to have a good idea and get some customers and pay all their people and go home without needing endless growth.
>> The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology
It's not the root cause but it's along the right path and very close to the root. The root is the monetary system with banks being able to print trillions of dollars and decide who can get that money and who can't... And VCs get a lot of that newly printed money, so do corporations (who provide exits for VCs).
> blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq
Blogging took off because half the worlds population started having access to the internet in the early 2000s. That seems incredibly myopic and US centric.
Not only is myopic and US-centered, it's just plain non-factual, LiveJournal really took off pre-9/11. Around 2000-2001 literally everyone in my friend group were on LJ (except me), and not just passively/occasionally - regular active users and always talking about LJ stuff IRL. Even people who didn't have a computer at home! It seemed like it was just as much a social network as it was a publishing platform.
According to Wikipedia LiveJournal had to implement an invite-only system for new users because they were growing faster than the server architecture could handle. This was all started pre-9/11.
That being said, I didn't hear the word "blog" until the year 2003.
Beyond that I don't recall the Iraq War being a major blogging topic. Sure, everyone has an opinion on the Iraq War, but how many blog posts can the average person actually write about their feelings on the Iraq War? Can't be more than a few, not a topic that's going to keep the masses activity blogging.
To say blogging was a "shared response" to the invasion of Iraq is just... bizarre.
The claim was not "there was several popular blogs that dealt with the topic of the Iraq War." The quote in full
>Why did blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq? (When “the Internet became an ideal valve to release opinions,” she writes, “who didn’t have an opinion on the Iraq war?”)
Basically claiming that blogging became popular because everyone wanted to share their opinion on the Iraq War. That's just not factual and, quite frankly, ridiculous.
I'd say either Blogger or Livejournal was the coming of age for blogging, the Iraq War had nothing to do with that, those things just happened around the same time without any direct connection between the two. The vast majority of blogs had totally different content.
Yeah, large-scale blogging was part of Web 2.0/read-write web which came into being around the time that it became much easier for "ordinary people" to publish on the Web but prior to the real social media wave of Facebook/Twitter/etc.
The timing lines up fairly well with Gulf War II but I would personally never have drawn a connection.
So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens.
And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the article as plain text, https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md
But for many of the core criticisms of large tech platforms like Facebook/Google/Twitter self hosting and federation doesn't really address the problems (fake news, fomenting extremism or conspiracy theory, harassment, discrimination) so much as make it so that there is not a single entity to villify.
And if you remove them from Facebook/Google/Twitter, they’ll still make their own side sites and keep spreading those things anyway (see: Reddit->Vote). The value of those things not being present in easy central entities is that it heavily limits their ability to easily spread.
Those issues you addressed are problems when everyone centralizes in one place and then an attempt is made to find one set of rules/ethics for everyone.
Cut the gordian knot. Just don't all centralize in one place and you no longer all need to follow the same rules.
That said, if you're using those platforms for monetary reasons then you'll have to stay there. Network effect. But that's for the best: profit motive is eventually toxic to community.
The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens.
It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's the opposite, the bias is in the other direction. Even hackers are on Slack and Twitter.
>But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET
Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population.
Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look).
~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry.
Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable.
Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.
You are counting 2 year olds in the denominator. IRC and Usenet were the internet. If you used a computer you used these. But yes, computers were less common then, especially amongst two year olds.
He’s also counting only Americans. There never was a time when normal people hanged out on IRC. Wikipedia has ~120 millions people on the Internet in 1997, and 10 millions IRC users at its peak in 2003. So 8% of Internet users on IRC is a wildly optimistic upper bound. 1% is probably closer to the truth.
You're right. Though I'd probably argue that a lot of people may be overly concerned with discoverability, follower counts, monitization, etc. You can blog/podcast/make videos/etc. as easily (or more so) as you could in the early 2000s. And you can always just link from Twitter or whatever. If you don't stress about maximizing your followers all the capabilities are still there.
But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.
I host my own content. Even then, 90% of my visitors come from search engines. This is not a problem for my personal blog, but it's a problem for my other website, which is my main source of income.
This is a much more serious problems in other fields, where you can only reach your crowd through YouTube or Instagram.
That being said, having a crowd wasn't even a thing back then. Platforms have given immensely talented people a free soapbox to show the world all sorts of things. Anyone can share something nowadays, not only people who know HTML and a few other things.
"Let’s admit it, we are all in the persuasion business. Technologists build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people 'users' and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making."
--"Hooked" (2013)
The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'"
One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.
Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/)
While it's a well-known and indeed snappy aphorism, many years after I heard it, I found out that in the mid-20th century, librarians used the term "users" for what they now call "patrons".
For examples: from 1952, "A public library user is defined as an individual twelve years of age or over who used either a branch library or bookmobile during the thirty days preceding the interview." (Quoting "Rural reading habits; a study of county library planning, Prince Georges County, Md.", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&vi... )
From 1931, "This was the first complete triple asyndetic dictionary catalog. It became a favorite with town and mercantile libraries, the idea always being that the user was searching for some book he knew about ..." ("Outline of the history of the development of the American public library", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&vi...)
Maybe it wasn't specific to library science either. I just did a broader search for "user" and found, for example, a 1905 ad for a book of tables for surveyors and engineers: "The computations enable the user to ascertain the sines and cosines for a distance of twelve miles to within half an inch, and this by reference to but One Table, in place of the usual Fifteen minute computations required. This alone is evidence of the assistance which the Tables ensure to every user ... " https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&vi...
>When users are scapegoated, Silicon Valley is left off the hook
Is this really the dominant narrative? Are there lots of thinkpieces going around about how fair and kind Silicon Valley is, if only it weren't for all those mean people using their services? Maybe it is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but when comparing the early internet to the current internet, we cannot let the users off the hook!
The further back you go, the harder it was to get on the internet, both as a user and a publisher. That meant the early internet was full of people who worked at universities, or were so motivated to discuss weird hobbies and interests with others that they struggled through the expense and technical difficulties, maybe even self-hosted, learned weird new languages from scratch. These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people.
It's like air travel. If you were flying in the 1970s you probably had an interesting or important job or story. Getting on a plane meant meeting a bunch of interesting people. Now it doesn't. That is not a bad thing and it's not Southwest's fault. And when people complain about it, even though they might target Southwest (or Facebook), there is really an underlying snobbery about it. I can't believe I have to sit next to all these commoners on my internet!
> These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people
> there is really an underlying snobbery about it
These contrast very interestingly, but I think it's missing an important point. The early internet was characterized by complete freedom of association. You could talk about whatever, with whomever. If enough people shared an interest, a community could form.
The problem with the modern internet isn't that the filthy plebs are using it - it's that all of the content suggestion algorithms, clickbait articles, and advertising are designed for maximum engagement. It's no longer what groups of "interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people" collectively put forward, without an ulterior financial incentive, that determines what content people see. I think that's the ultimate issue - it's not that low quality content proliferates, it's that there are few if any ways of finding high-quality content among all the crap.
It's one of the main reasons I read Hacker News - it's an excellent content filter.
People forget the impressive quality of some online content now. Everyone can publish something now, not just technically inclined hobbyists. It gave us videos with insane production quality, top notch writing and larger and more diverse communities than ever before.
If a few ads and annoying modals is the price to pay for free, endless quality content, so be it.
I find it ironic that this article talks about the user losing out to aggressive (and intrusive) advertising on the web, but presents me with an un-closeable modal window[0] asking me to subscribe to their blog. Note: I have JS disabled by default, and had to temporarily enable JS to view the article, but it's still intrusive and annoying for users.
Curious to why you had to turn on JS to view the article. The article is contained, in its entirety, in the initial page load. I use a modified version of links that doesn't even have javascript to turn on and the page popped open, as most do, without distractions.
I got the popup message, but could delete it with the element inspector. But I still dislike the large font size and narrow margins, so I also disabled CSS and that fixed it.
I believe it would not be advertising to display the next episode of a series, or even auto play it. But it would be advertising to display a different series or film.
For a fuzzier one, how about a newspaper providing links to their other stories at the bottom of an article that you have read? Typically I gain nothing by ingesting more of a particular publication's writing, so that could be an ad rather than useful functionality. Perhaps not in a special circumstance such as if I am trying to catch up on news local to that publication.
I don't really mind links to other articles at the bottom of the article that I'm reading. I mean, yes, it's a kind of advertising, but it's not intrinsically intrusive. If a site brings up a modal popup while I'm scrolling an article saying "OMG ENTER YOUR EMAIL HERE TO GET NOTIFIED WHENEVER WE WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING [or click this tiny text that says "no" in the most passive-aggressive phrasing we could think of]", that's a different issue.
(I kind of wonder if internet advertising would be a lot less hated if it had developed with a culture of restraint rather than maximum in-your-faceness, although to be fair, I'm not sure how that could ever have happened.)
Yes. And I find it annoying when HBO plays ads for their shows before starting what I have selected to watch. They started doing this a year or two ago.
> […] carpet-bombing campaign to market the still nascent World Wide Web […] ad blitz […]
I get it, advertising sucks. Still, save the military terminology for things that are related to the fucking military.
I mean, I wonder what a 57-year-old from Cambodia would think when he reads about how much the author suffered under the "carpet-bombing campaign" of AOL and the likes.
The user always loses because the user is not the paying customer. Advertisers, surveillance agencies, and propagandists are the paying customers. Businesses serve the paying customer, not the “user” who in this model is the product.
This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or free everyone else must follow suit and the economic model collapses. The cheapest crap and/or content with ulterior motives funded by someone else wins.
Advertisers aren't winning either. They're paying more and more for ads with fewer avenues for unpaid traffic.
You could maybe say that they're getting more measurable results than back in the day of TV and press dominance but having seen it from the inside, I doubt most are sophisticated enough to make use of that.
I don’t think the metrics or analytics are really giving better results. Mainly because platform access has become a product, that is defined by the seller.
You could very easily measure the effects of a 90’ies styled super soaker TV adds in sales. You can’t as easily measure the success of the Facebook advertisement for your board game kickstarter campaign.
The article misses the point. The problem has its root in monetary policy. The problem is supply-side economics.
Money printing and giving control of the money supply to banks has made consumers redundant appendages of the financial system.
Imagine that you're the CEO of a unicorn startup or a big corporation and you constantly deal with investors, banks and customers.
Which of these 3 groups do you derive most of your wealth from? Banks and investors.
Banks print money and loan it out to your investors and your investors use that money to buy your company stock and drive up its price - Also, banks loan your company money directly to buy back its own stock...
As an executive, if you want to maximize your bonus, banks and investors are the only two entities you really care about... Your actual customers are merely appendages; they're merely a useful metric which allows you to get more money from investors and banks.
So long as all the new fiat money enters the economy through big institutions and big investors via bank loans, the consumer will always be an afterthought in the decision-making process.
You're the product because you're not the source of money. Consumers don't have any money. Only institutions have money because they're printing it for free and distributing it among themselves by the trillions.
That's why we need UBI (Universal Basic Income) urgently - That's the only safe way to switch to sane demand-side economics.
This problem is most apparent during a recession, when the central bank (rightly) strives to quickly increase the money supply by buying bonds (and apparently equities!).
If instead there could be a joint policy by The Fed and the Social Security Administration, then the flow of money (and thereby attention)_could be less lopsided.
>> when the central bank (rightly) strives to quickly increase the money supply
I disagree completely that central banks trying to increase the money supply is righteous in any way. I'm a value producer and this monetary policy has harmed me.
I can see exactly how it has harmed me and I can see the kinds of people it has benefited and I don't agree at all. The central bank has stolen value from me and given it to my enemy.
Okay. I don't see how you make the logical leap from "this monetary policy has harmed me and benefited people I don't like" to "this is not righteous".
Printing of fiat money and injecting it into the economy through big government contracts and bank loans has mostly benefited large corporations.
Because of their front row access to all this easy money, corporations and a handful of big VC-backed unicorn startups have had an upper hand in the market (see Cantillon effect) and they were (and still are) in every industry; this made it impossible to start my own business no matter what industry I went into.
Also, I did some open source work, launched a popular project and corporations got into open source too and destroyed all possible business opportunities for me. Corporations couldn't even keep their hands off from open source.
It seems that my project was blacklisted/censored somewhere because no corporation seems to have ever used my project in spite of the fact that it's very popular with startups and independent developers. I got 0 consulting contracts from any big corporations. I had discussions with some corporates who backed out in a very suspicious way for no apparent reason.
And also, as a software developer I was harmed through the ongoing bureaucratization of the tech industry by big corporations and the startups who mindlessly copy them; I've witnessed the introduction of more tools, more processes and ever decreasing productivity in the industry.
I could go on and on for hours about all the problems I've encountered and most of them link back to corporations and their upper hand in our fiat monetary system due to Cantillon effects.
At one time, a minority of people were on the internet, often with their own blogs, but most people were just watching TV.
Now, most people are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other massively high-traffic websites, while a minority of people are on the rest of the internet, often with their own blogs.
It's not as different as it looks, it's just that the TV networks got displaced by the few high-traffic websites. It's apocalyptic for for-profit TV, radio, and newspaper companies, who have been mostly circling the drain as FAANG gobbles up their ad revenue. But the impact on "the internet" is not as different as it looks, it's just that "the internet" now needs a new name, like maybe "the low-traffic-website internet" but shorter (tltwi, pronounced "tilt-we"), because the Old Media are now co-hosted on the same infrastructure.
Most people didn't get on the internet prior to AOL. Most people don't leave the high-traffic-sites internet now. It's not like there aren't any blogs left. It's not as different as it looks.
This transformation of customers to “users” (an otherwise appropriate and even innocuous term when used in context) parallels the commonplace use of “consumer” for “person” (a usage I even see on HN).
We all have many roles, in which it may be appropriate to consider us as “user”, “customer”, “consumer”, “driver”, “parent”, “friend”...* preferring the term “person” might remind us that at the end of the day that the user’s interest is not necessarily aligned with ours (usually joystick in face) and that we need them more than they need us.
* I had a colleague who refers to parents of teens as “protectors of terrorists”. Yes, he had four teens himself. While the term was unwieldy and the joke rapidly wore thin, it reminded me of the various roles played by parents...and kids, and made me more tolerant of the foibles of teens. When we bundle a person into “user” it’s easy to lose perspective on the actual objective.
For a while old media subsidized online media and that was the short "golden" age of online newspapers, magazines etc., Never to return.
For those if us not obsessed with twitter and Facebook the golden age is now, the amount and quality of information available to an engineer is incredible and the online communities are mostly positive.
Someone mentioned federation but the problem is that often there isn't a good group to federate. Google+ wasn't great, but I do miss circles. But the intersection of my circles and the circles of those in my circles were small.
I feel like the "correct" model is users hosting their data with apps operating on it in a decentralized (or multi-layer federation ) way. But the economics are just really, really hard without certain restrictions, like always on connections for a primary 'home' device.
Nobody seems to mention Product Manager culture e.g. the cult of A/B and their rewards for often dubious engagement metrics. Admittedly this is somewhat of a second order effect of the VC model, but I'll argue it's now the universal standard for success regardless of the initial motivator.
If people openly believe that centralization of the web is bad yet we continue pumping unnecessary money into the tech industry - then surely this must mean we're in a bubble. How wrong am I?
This is probably why I’m always attracted to productivity tools. Spending $10 to save $100 is a net positive contribution. Skinner boxing people and spying on them are not.
We also live in a "consumer always loses" economy as well. It could just be "consumer" supercedes "user".
I was listening to Richard Wolff describing to Patrick Bet-David how capitalism creates monopolies and in the end the consumers always lose [1]. As companies get bigger, they become worse actors. I can't think of a counter example.
Patrick thinks everything has gotten cheaper and the consumer is winning, at least today (since history only backs the thesis). Richard couldn't come up with immediate counter examples regarding how Amazon is abusing their monopoly priviledges but FBA pricing and seller fees came to mind. Someone in the comments mentioned prescription drugs.
Nostalgia for the old internet is basically nostalgia for a wild period of market capture that will never come again. People took chances and accepted massive short term losses in an attempt to capture hypothetical market share. Now that we know better what the internet is going to look like you aren't going to see people take big chances and provide user value at massive discounts again (simple example: News papers providing articles in front of paywalls).
Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption.
I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.