Not specific to discord, but what's broken is that work is organized to maximize personal profit of shareholders (and the remuneration and other privileges of managers), not to benefit users/society.
I'm not against people profiting from their activity, in the broad sense of the word (though i'm personally opposed to money as a tool/concept). But profit-driven social organization has lead to many avoidable disasters: security in tech, safety in buildings/planes, low durability of products and planned obsolescence, impeding ecological disaster and the next massive extinction of species...
As a species, we have enough production capacity to make sure everyone is well-off, yet a tiny minority grabs resources and ensures most of it is wasted and thrown away (see food/housing supply vs needs). Capitalism is the name of the system which holds such properties as virtuous, and it has proved to be a failed model in many regards over the centuries.
Shareholder who? Why would I, a shareholder, want corporations to pursue business strategies that leads to avoidable disaster and ultimately loss of profit?
What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.
Note that the context of this conversation is someone blaming capitalism for Discord becoming bloated because Discord’s founders have a goal of increasing their wealth.
It seems alternatives to Discord exist for users that do not wish for this bloat, but users do not want to do the work of hosting it (e.g. teamspeak/ventrilo/matrix).
So what I am wondering is where the obligation for someone else to host these online services comes in, and why they “should” not have the goal of increasing their wealth in exchange for doing the work of hosting and servi the online services.
> I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.
Well first, we usually don't hear about alternative models because they're mostly erased from dominant narratives (or defaced to the point they make no sense). Famous examples include witch hunting during the renaissance and the abolition of community life (in favor of State/Church control), the Cronstadt and Ukrainian revolts in the USSR... see also "Popular history" as a research field.
Now, whether an alternative model is possible is up to debate. You use "on a large scale" as a premise, so primitivist/individualist approaches will not cut it (although they're valid ways of life for smaller communities). Have you considered the anarcho-syndicalist model? It has strong roots/history in Spain (especially in the colonized region of Catalonia) and was the heart of the popular (armed) uprising against Franco's fascist coup d'État. That is a well-documented historical experience of a large-scale agrarian/industrial (mixed) society operating on a large scale without a capitalist understanding of "profit" involved. Although to be fair it did not last long, as the revolution was eaten from within by Stalin's authoritarian clique (who had smaller numbers but considerably more weapons and resources imported from USSR, and started massacring anyone who disagreed).
We'll probably find common ground in that everyone needs to be valued for their contributions to society, which could be called "profit" in some variants of that concept. However, i would argue that not all activities need to be "profited" from (eg. arts), and that money and private property (in their capitalist interpretations, at the very least) are very bad implementations of that concept, in which a lot of people who are very useful to society are not being remunerated accordingly, while a bunch of parasite who contribute very little to society earn all the benefits.
> What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.
Have society really taken on learned helplessness on a mass scale? In a sense that everyone has a defeatist attitude of "we can't think of any system better than current capitalism so why change?"
Or is it more probable that there are some vested interest in keeping the status quo?
- Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company.
- Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets.
- Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the ability to export data.
None of these things are about abandoning capitalist ideas entirely. There's a lot of merit to them. But they are about tweaking them to that power doesn't solely lie with money and is diluted with power from other sources.
Those are all interesting and viable proposition, but I would not say they have any relation to the “shareholder model” as you called it in your first post I responded to. All of those proposals, and shareholders, seem like they can co exist.
It's not shareholders that I have a problem with, it's giving shareholders exclusive control of companies. They may seem like small tweaks, but you end up with a very different model.
Exactly. It's like game balance: you can have a game scenario where there's an exploit, and everyone ends up simply going with the exploit or being crushed, causing the game to become simplified to an uninteresting, uninvolving mechanical process whereupon it just dies, because it's no fun. There are a few people who think they are the big winners because they're the masters of the exploit, but they're whales in a tiny pond and are themselves stifled by how dead their environment is, and may themselves die off, still being the biggest whale in the drying-up pond, and insisting they've mastered everything that matters.
I don't know about Discord specifically, but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else.
Now, you might think that this still aligns shareholder incentives with the long-term interests of the company, that if the shareholders care about profits over the long term then they should also care about the health of the business rather than just about how much money they are making now. The problem is that the most efficient way for investors to make money (per unit time) is not to care about the long term and instead to "pump and dump" companies by directing them towards (usually destructive) activities that increase profits in the short term, then selling the shares before the value inevitably crashes.
Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time. As such, the system is setup to give power to those who are most destructive to real value creation. Ergo: broken.
> but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else.
What alternatives are there?
> Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time.
The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
Worker representation on boards is one example. Imagine if the board of public companies was 50% shareholders and 50% workers.
> The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
The most profitable companies yes, but not necessarily the ones making the most money for their investors. Part of this pattern is that the companies typically end up dying a slow and painful death, meaning that they never get to be as big as the largest companies. But money in investing is made on change in value/profits, not on profits themselves.
I guess I would say that the pattern I have described doesn't describe the entire economy. There is more traditional long-term investing going on too. But it's there. And it's harmful.
Workers have their own interests that are not necessarily aligned with those of the users/society, such as support working hours only from nine to five on business days, higher pensions and fewer new hires, more job security.
If you really want to align the interests of the company with those of the users, you need something like a cooperative where the users are also the shareholders and you have to buy a membership to use the product.
I don't want to align the interests of the company with users. I want to align them with society. And I think it's worth noting that members of society are not just users but also workers.
> Workers have their own interests that are not necessarily aligned with those of the users/society
Usually you will find that they are, because workers are also users and vice-versa.
> support working hours only from nine to five on business days, higher pensions and fewer new hires, more job security
I guess you're from the US? "Higher pensions" should have nothing to do with a company: that's a public policy matter and pensions can be mutualized across employers as is the case in France (despite past & present governments doing their best to dismantle that public service).
The 8h workday is established minimum standard across industries for over a century now (several centuries in some industries/places), and even when it was not (see Haymarket affair) it was considered a pretty weak/useless demand, more symbolic than anything. Thinkers of the time advocated that given the established technological progress at the time, it should be possible for everyone to work just a few weeks every year and still enjoy modern comfort. Some more modern thinkers believe the same applies today, considering how many resources/efforts are wasted annually.
Moreover, "fewer new hires" is not necessarily correlated to "more job security". It may be true on the scale of a single company, but on the scale of a whole society, a public policy of everyone finding opportunity for their contributions to humanity (that rarely yet sometimes overlaps with what's called a "job") leads to better "job security" for everyone and anyone.
If a government really wanted to tackle unemployment, there's many areas of life that need considerably more workers and resources, including education & health which are pillars of a healthy (pun intended) society. But capitalist policy is to generate misery in order to pit everyone against everyone else so a tiny minority can profit... and in this regard, capitalism works excellently.
> you need something like a cooperative where the users are also the shareholders and you have to buy a membership to use the product
That's how many non-profit organizations operate. You have to be a member (free or < 20€/year) to benefit from services provided by the association.
> Usually you will find that they are, because workers are also users and vice-versa.
I am sure that the owners and managers of Discord are also Discord users themselves, so I don't see any difference here.
> The 8h workday is established minimum standard across industries for over a century now
An 8-hour workday does not rule out employees working shifts so that customers don't have to take a day off to interact with the company.
My point is that, contrary to OP's assumption, the interests of workers and customers are often at odds with each other. Another example would be when more employees are needed to meet increased demand, but the employees do not want their votes and wages to be diluted by the new hires.
> the interests of workers and customers are often at odds with each other
I've never heard any such stories from an actual workers coop. I'm not saying it can't exist from a theoretical perspective, but i don't think workers/users interests are "often at odds" since i can't think of a single real-life example.
I'm also free to give all of my money away to the poor, but that's not going to help solve poverty in any major way because my influence on society as an individual is limited. There can be a much greater benefit in coercing everyone to follow a rule that isn't realised by allowing individuals to choose something.
> Worker representation on boards is one example. Imagine if the board of public companies was 50% shareholders and 50% workers.
Sure, that is an interesting option. But what about Discord, since it is not public? Does anyone that starts a business have to give half of the decision making power to workers from day 1?
I cannot parse the concept you are trying to explain in your second paragraph.
> Does anyone that starts a business have to give half of the decision making power to workers from day 1?
It could be mandated by law, indeed. Or the shareholding model could be outright removed because it's poison for society as a whole, as the history of workers/consumers coops shows.
On the contrary, something very obvious stops workers from buying enough shares to appoint someone to the board: access to capital. What you say is true in theory, I suppose, but is far from true in practice for any reasonably-sized publicly-traded company. How can an average worker at Walmart practically voice any opinion via shares?
Just spitballing, but an independent auditor that puts a dollar value on the expected long term gains/losses to a company's brand portfolio based on recent management decisions could help reduce certain types of short-term "cashing in" behaviour.
>The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
Maybe not the largest companies, but he's basically described the default behaviour of private equity firms.
