The article doesn’t mention a number of contributing problems such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a problem.
Perhaps Ycombinator is the wrong place to bring up such a point, but the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company almost certainly contributes significantly to the problems discussed in the article.
What happened to community? The businesses I like to deal with are rooted in my area, owned and operated by local people with faces, and I willingly go interact with them.
I have no such loyalty to large faceless internet companies, and negative loyalty to companies that enshittify everything as a way to eke out profit when bound to forever growth fantasies.
If you read the writing of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, he calls out growth as the underlying cause of these issues. Our current economic system is oriented around growth and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.
> Our current economic system is oriented around growth and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.
It's worse than that. For the present system to function correctly, growth must continue indefinitely. Even just a slower pace of growth constitutes a crisis under our current economic system.
Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's just that economic stagnation or recession currently means some people are going to be starving. And if you actually look at the world, with its still growing population in some countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing to do with capitalism, or The Man.
Japan hasn’t had much GDP growth since 1990. You could say that its economy is stagnating. Yet starvation is hardly a defining phenomenon for its population. They have one of the highest life expectancies. Healthcare is widely available. Technological progress did not stop. And wealth inequality in this economy is among the lowest in the world.
I'm a N. American developer who worked in Tokyo for 6 months back in '94. The most striking aspect of Japanese culture that is not present in N. America is a shared identity that everyone collaborates to make Japan and Japanese culture better. The common everyone, it seemed, held that value. Which is 100% absent from N. American culture; here our cultural value is "get mine, from you if possible, f everyone else" it seems.
That applies to the economy as a whole. It doesn't mean that every single corporation in the economy has to grow, beyond the general rate of GDP growth.
Yeah, this certainly isn't on the users. The change is monopolies but perhaps even more, the end to the growth of the Internet. Both of these imply that each company needs to leverage each user it has. And that basically means pushing the users to make choices in every single situation where the user can be pushed.
Here, you have various ideologies of user interface. One is approach that users are idiots/"easily confused" and need to be treated-as-such/"given clear direction. Another seems to this reference to the marginal user - that our product is craptasm of dark pattern 'cause we have to satisfy the least common denominator (it's Google, so maybe we're just on dark gray patterns currently).
As I said, my anti-growth example is the local family restaurant, that's hugely successful and profitable, popular, provides steady employment to new family members, and is not trying to take over the world.
If it throws off profits, those can be invested in other businesses, not in growing the restaurant.
If local familiy restaurants worked like apps and had no virtually no marginal costs to feed another user or serve a new entree, then it would stop being an anti-growth example. Cheesecake Factory+ would scale up and then the market would clone and chase them.
Your local family restaurant is a low-value-added frontend for Sysco. Or in Marxist terms, they're petit-bourgeois feudalists, which isn't even as good as being a capitalist because it doesn't increase prosperity.
> I have no such loyalty to large faceless internet companies, and negative loyalty to companies that enshittify everything as a way to eke out profit when bound to forever growth fantasies.
You do, sure. But you're not a marginal user.
A lot of the fine article reads to me as a sort of elitism, albeit one I find myself falling prey to: the tyranny of the masses, the normies, the filthy casuals, that ruin everything.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought (possibly derailed, or just no steam), but I'd like to throw in that elitism is not always a bad thing.
> the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company
This is a straw man. The primary source of value is the future cash flow. Since a long future is considered, growth is highly prized. I consider this a major achievement of mankind, to be able to value the future, today. Without this reasoning, financing for new businesses would cease to exist.
That's a good point. I think you're referencing a Present Value calculation? My big issue with a lot of valuation techniques is they are based on exponential growth. That strikes me as overly optimistic, leading to decisions that overlook profitable businesses that do not grow exponentially.
They're based on constant growth. I guess over a long enough time frame, constant growth is exponential, but not in the windows that an investor expects to be paid back.
Exponential growth is only expected in software because the development costs are so high and the marginal costs are so low. There's zero cost to growth, which makes it a winner-take-all market.
Exponential growth is also expected within new businesses within an established corporation. Similar to software's margins and distribution advantage, an existing corporation can often pursue new businesses with an existing infrastructure that approaches minimal additional expense beyond human salaries. The reference to "hurdle rate" is an often used term by corporate MBAs evaluating the worth of a new line of business.
The article does mention monopoly power, but it uses instead the term 'network effects'. These are not exactly the same, but in the realm of social media and similar platforms, they're very close.
> The article doesn’t mention a number of contributing problems such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a problem.
Indeed, and it shows when you look at how and where money is invested. Transoceanic fiber cables [1]... on paper it's a Good Thing that Africa and other historically piss poor regions get access to fast Internet, no doubt there. Or that Facebook pays many millions of dollars to regional ISPs for zero-rating, which helps them build out infrastructure.
But IMO, this is not genuine. The priorities for the mega tech companies clearly are to get more users hooked to their walled gardens, as the Western markets are already saturated and no further growth of the MLM pyramid/snowball scam is possible. Receiver nations are grasping at straws, it's obvious why - they need the infrastructure and have no way to pay for it - but it's going to bite them in the ass in the mid future.
Perhaps Ycombinator is the wrong place to bring up such a point, but the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company almost certainly contributes significantly to the problems discussed in the article.
What happened to community? The businesses I like to deal with are rooted in my area, owned and operated by local people with faces, and I willingly go interact with them.
I have no such loyalty to large faceless internet companies, and negative loyalty to companies that enshittify everything as a way to eke out profit when bound to forever growth fantasies.