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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

This is what keeps me up at night these days. Between information gerrymandering, the quest for increased engagement, uncanny valleys, de-platforming and so forth I wonder how it will affect our ability to avoid misinformation, have original ideas, and not descend into some weird form of chaos a la Idiocracy (2006).

If anyone is passionate about trying to find ways to treat people like individual humans again, please reach out to me. I want to solve this problem by creating a business that's sustainable and better than the Google/FB approach.

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One way developers and product managers can help craft the world you envision is to exercise good moral judgement when confronted with choices that may lead to degraded sovereignty of personal data. The same way a civil engineer ought not sign off on a bridge design that's compromised.

I realize not everyone is in a position to take a stand, and some will argue others will inevitably step in to do the shady deed. Keep in mind bold actions of integrity will often inspire others.

It's really, really hard to do this when it goes against the bottom line, no matter how good of a person you are.

The company will eventually act in ways that serve to increase revenue. Thus, if your incentives are misaligned, the actions you take to increase revenue will be harmful to users.

there are corporate structures that allow for decisions that aren't profit-seeking above all else. private corps and social purpose corps, are just two types:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

Sometimes doing what's right lands you in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

It's important to reiterate that this isn't an issue with companies, nor with people per se. The issue is that the bottom line is the only incentive in capitalist economies.

One can dream up other forms of economies where the incentive would not be there. Some have already been discussed in great detail over the past couple centuries.

The extra problem here is: can the alternative forms of economy survive in competition with capitalism? If not, then they're unfortunately a non-starter.

(It's like with what is said about early humans discovering agriculture. Settling down and growing crops led to worse health and less happy life than hunter-gathering, but still gave people competitive advantage over the societies that did not make the transition.)

This is exactly the reason the USSR fell. Sure, a lot of morally reprehensible actions were performed on innocent citizens, but that's not what actually ended it. The US et al. fought the USSR by destroying their crops and imposing high tariffs. The USSR couldn't produce everything it needed and so suffered because it still had to defer to the capitalist nations for the rest (who were, measured using the capitalist GDP metric, accelerating far in front of the USSR). The "communism" employed by the leaders of the USSR wasn't as profit-hungry as other strategies and so the federation suffered.

It's interesting to see number of ultra-wealthy individuals who refocus their lives on philanthropy. Perhaps there's a point at which reputation and "good karma" became a more valuable commodity.

There's a HUGE difference in those.

A civil engineer can analyze a structure an say "based on dimensions, projected load, etc, etc this is likely to fail in these ways" and there are estimates, measurements and equations to back up the conclusion. More importantly, since they're based on physical principles, other civil engineers can repeat the analysis and should get the same conclusion.

But "good moral judgement" is an entirely subjective term. Whether you grew up atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, agnostic, etc, etc or have a drive to improve the world or silence dissenting or harmful ideas or or or.. will have a major impact in what you consider, how you analyze, and therefore the conclusion you come to. And my conclusion - or even your conclusion a year from now - may not be the same.

Ethics and morality is not science and can't be reduced to a simple, repeatable equation.

You should reach out to the folks at https://teamhuman.fm/. Might be some connections you could make there along these lines.

Thanks for the info! I'll try reaching out, but I'm probably too small of a fish for them to be interested :)

Great way to make someone think you're too small of a fish is to outright say it!

I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service.

One can see this in how quickly various products fall when a free alternative exists. How many people buy an email client, for example?

I'm trying to prove this hypothesis wrong :) Obviously it's a big experiment.

My belief is that with the right incentive system, and right messaging & social proof, you can fix the problem. We're not there yet, but we are seeing it work on a very small scale.

I would love to see you succeed!

Thanks!

This has been true for a few decades, but it may not continue to be indefinitely.

Also, it’s worth asking wondering what percentage of users you need in order to make a huge impact even if most people continue to use free stuff.

My guess is that it could be as low as 1%.

Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head. When it comes to new companies and business models, timing is super important. A great example of this was the dotcom boom where you saw a bunch of companies with (arguably) the right idea go bust, and then years later another company picked up where they left off and succeeded.

MS Windows is the great exception to this, where not only do they collect an inflated price for their software, they also spy on their users. So making money on the product is no guarantee that a software vendor won't also invade your privacy.

Apparently the key to success is to get corporate lock-in.

MS Windows builds on a very long history, which involves it positioning itself as the default OS on PCs (price bundled with the price of equipment), which led to a lot of software (games in particular) being written just for it. It also strongly benefited for being free for a sizable population of the world - by means of Microsoft not fighting rampant piracy of its systems.

Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.

I think context matters here...

In the US, at least, debt is really high. There is a regular desire for "more". And to get "more" faster than previous generations did. All while the generations entering the workforce make less (when accounting for inflation) than previous generations did at the same age.

This can drive people to try to get more from "free" things. Things aren't "free" but instead you pay with something else you may not realize the consequence of.

It's almost a "privacy debt" instead of a financial one.

Any new thing to fight the paying with privacy instead of money model needs to start in a landscape like this.

>I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service.

That is the current state yes, but I think that this was a manufactured type of psychology/expectation. I remember back in the day (90s 00s) when I used to install software for my family, one of my uncles was always flabbergasted that the software was free. "But why is it free?" "How do the make rent?!" I tried to explain the Hacker/OSS ethos and whatever else I could think of, but it never really sunk in for him.

I think paid software is going to make a comeback once clients realize that nobody except google (and a handful of companies) are actually benefiting from the pointless web surveillance. Hopefully that will happen when the tech industry stops giving Google a free pass for their spying and squarely puts them in the enemy camp...

you can be a 'good human' yourself, whatever that means. and if you start a business you can make an effort to try and be a 'good business', whatever that means. you won't earn billions, but perhaps can 'feel good about yourself', whatever that means.

You say as if it was all in GP's head, but being "a good human" and running a "good business" are concepts that are commonly understood, if a little fuzzy in the details. They're also the underpinning of society - the more good actors playing fair you have, the more stable and efficient a society is.

care to elaborate then? almost all decisions aren't as seemingly easy as you've stated. genuinely curious as most decisions straddle the whole "good" spectrum pretty seriously.

one thing i just went through: should i pick up the contract from a slightly less "good" org, or let 2 1099ers go, whose families will go without income for some period of time?

what's the good choice here in your opinion? or by good do you just mean non-cheating? is incorporating your company in a lower COL/higher talent area cheating in your eyes? etc. gets hairy quick.

I don't think the decisions are easy. Especially under competitive pressure.

> one thing i just went through: should i pick up the contract from a slightly less "good" org, or let 2 1099ers go, whose families will go without income for some period of time?

Depends on the "slightly". If slightly enough, can you reject the contract and help these 1099ers find another contract, by e.g. referring them? I don't know the details of your situation and I'm not going to judge you either way.

I've been on the receiving end of a similar situation in that my boss once told me that there are troubles and he's looking for projects, and one potential contract that would be a good fit for my skills involved work on gambling machines. I refused on ethical grounds, and he later told me he was very happy that I did, because it didn't sit well with him either. Unfortunately, this ended up folding the company. Fortunately, he helped me move to another job and he got a job in a large shop himself, and from what I can tell, this ended up beneficial to everyone involved.

Besides these borderline situations, there's plenty in business world that's happening on the "bad" side. Like, does the grocery store next to my parents' house have to wash spoiling meat with a dish cleaner and sell it as fresh? Does the boss of a certain large secondhand book store in Poland have to mentally abuse his workers, exploiting the fact that he employs people from small towns who may have trouble finding a new job? Does he have to bribe local government inspector so that this doesn't get out[0]? Do restaurants have to offer "grilled" meat which really is microwaved meat with grill marks added with a sandwitch grill?

These are examples of clearly bad behavior. Whenever I befriend people working in any industry, I get to hear new stories like these. Companies doing that may get away with it on an open market, but these things do breed contempt. And come economic turmoil, people with pitchforks won't be checking if you were the (perceivably) rare entrepreneur that was good and honest.

As for what's the good choice in general, I think this is always incremental and case-by-case, but a guiding principle I could offer would be the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Always strive to turn everything into win-win. Don't exploit people.

[0] - Allegation I have on good authority, but the party telling me this doesn't want to pursue it or have anything to do with their former boss. Fortunately, the guy got a kick in the butt from the building safety inspectors, who were unwilling to ignore the fact that the walls in the workplace were cracking. I heard the working conditions improved a little bit after that.

competitive pressure is why i noted you won't earn billions.

i say it like that because what 'good' is is subjective. you are right though, the more good there are, whatever that is ^^...., the easier it will be. but to get to that point, people need to personally take that stance, not wait for others to do it.

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