The root cause of our issues is the economic austerity imposed on the public causing disaffection of the masses. Dividing this public and redirecting this anger against each other and scapegoats leads to what you refer to.
From the de-industrialization of a country, the privatization of previously public goods, subsidization of the wealthy by everyone else, the decoupling of national wealth from labor, I mean we can go on and on. And lest you think I’m partisan, both parties are complicit, but this is hardly an American phenomenon.
Starts with a tax on taxes. The richer you are, the less tax you will pay. This is a cost to the entire nation as most people aren't rich and most people require the benefits of taxes.
After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.
I think that's the number 1 reason. Bot simply drive away useful content.
I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.
It’s interesting—playing devil’s advocate on the purse example, I’m not sure I’d actually call that meaningful. It’s certainly a kind and thoughtful gift, but meaningful?
What if meaning isn’t only about the relationship or the recipient’s satisfaction, but also about what the gift costs the giver in terms of personal value? In the yard-sale case, the purse may be rare to the mom, but it’s essentially cheap and disposable to the giver. Nothing important was surrendered.
By contrast, giving something you personally prize—or investing yourself in a way that reflects what you value—seems to carry a different kind of meaning. I’m not claiming effort alone creates meaning, but that the giver’s valuation of what’s given might be a missing dimension in this framework
You're not wrong--there seems to be some connection between effort and meaning. But I don't think it's that simple. For example, imagine I go to Starbucks and buy my mom a branded mug. Meaningful? Probably not. Now imagine that I drive 8 hours across state lines to a Starbucks and buy my mom a branded mug. It's still not meaningful even though I made a huge effort.
The effort itself has the be meaningful! It can't be effort for effort's sake. The effort has to produce something that could not be obtained without effort. But that means it's not the effort that counts--it's getting something that could not be obtained otherwise.
The board could argue that it's damaging to the company's brand and long term bottom dollar to charge such usurious fees and fire the CEO for taking such a harsh stance with app developers.
Boards are not some sort of unelected shadow government that exists to depose leaders if they aren't squeezing enough blood from the stone.
Appointing a new CEO is time consuming and carries enormous market ramifications that could backfire on shareholders if it goes wrong, putting their own board seats at risk. Stability and peaceful transitions of power benefit everybody in this prisoner's dillema. A new CEO will be shopped around to the public years before they actually take power so there aren't any surprises when they do.
The CEO willing to do something like that would never find themselves in that position. One becomes a CEO through a process that filters those kinds of people out and builds the remaining into willing participants.
This nonsense has been parroted so often by now there should be a name for it.
And I'll be happy to prove you wrong: there are many things that Apple could do but hasn't done yet that would make them money and yet nobody is suing them for that. For instance they could make the cut 35% or 50% and if they don't then shareholders would sue. But they won't.
I’m not sure we’re actually disagreeing. Boards are expected to maximize long-term shareholder value, not mechanically maximize short-term revenue at every opportunity. Sometimes that means pushing harder on extraction; other times it means holding back because of regulatory risk, developer backlash, or brand damage.
The claim isn’t that Apple must raise fees to 35% or be sued—clearly that’s not how fiduciary duty works. The claim is that, over time, dominant platforms tend to increase extraction once they’ve locked in users and developers. That pattern has been observed repeatedly, and it’s what people are pointing to when they talk about “enshittification.” Individual fee levels can vary, but the long-term direction for monopoly or duopoly platforms is fairly consistent.
To everything you can find exceptions, no one's arguing what you're claiming. And you have to read between the lines here, a board doesn't have to remove a CEO for a decision, what I'm trying to point out is the CEO knows their job, and the board knows their job. Just like there's things you know if you do you won't get a good pay raise or bonus (or gasp, get fired), the CEO knows how to avoid that in the long term. The board also knows what they must do over the long term to keep their nice board seat. No one has to get sued to get the message.
I’m not claiming CEOs are legally required to chase every conceivable revenue dollar or that they’d lose a lawsuit if they don’t. Corporate law doesn’t work that way, and no serious person thinks it does.
What does exist is a well-understood governance and incentive regime: boards evaluate CEOs on long-term shareholder value, compensation is tied to financial performance, and strategic restraint has to be justified in those terms. That doesn’t require lawsuits, and it doesn’t require explicit mandates. It’s how large public companies are run.
The fact that Apple could charge 50% and chooses not to doesn’t refute this — it just shows that extraction is constrained by regulation, backlash, and platform risk. But once those constraints weaken, dominant platforms reliably increase extraction. That’s an empirical pattern, not a legal theory.
I’ve heard it said that monopolies aren’t a flaw of the system—they’re its product. What else could perpetual, cutthroat competition lead to? This isn’t an unintended consequence. In every new era, even when an industry is disrupted or reinvented, a small number of dominant companies work aggressively to prevent real upheaval—by acquiring smaller competitors, engaging in regulatory capture, and shaping the rules in their favor. Historically, governments have often served the interests of their corporate patrons. The system itself is built for maximal extraction, and there is no “invisible hand” waiting in the wings to protect consumers. There are no evil and good CEOs, just cogs in this machine doing what they're incentivized to do, accumulate.
There is no monopoly here though. Android makes up a pretty substantial proportion of users. That users continue to use Apple devices despite this kind of greed (and that people on HN cheered when Apple defeated Epic in court) shows that users don't care, which is unfortunate.
At the societal level this trend has been happening for decades, and not just in the west. It’s a global trend correlated with the degree of integration into the “global machine.” This machine commodifies and extracts. It extracts more money if you’re lonely. If you’re isolated. If community is replaced with cold market exchange. If all your needs and wants are solved with a purchase or a monetized distraction.
Yet even when the system makes it hard to imagine anything else, we’re never too far from our true nature. We need only take a step towards a neighbor and carve a space, no matter how small, separate from the machine. That’s the only way out.
I feel like there's something in the zeitgeist happening. I've only become aware recently of the 'gift economy' but I'm seeing more and more people post things related.
Productivity will go up, competition will go up, profits will go down, unemployment will go up, wages will go down, a crisis will occur, consolidations and monopolies will emerge, hyper inequality will then break a system incapable of compromise. But sure, there will be a lot of washing machines.
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