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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Within 45 minutes of where I live lies a little town that is known for hundreds of miles around as a place to go shopping for locally-produced art and hand-crafted items of almost any kind. You know, glass items, wind chimes, paintings, etc. Why does this still work, 30 years into the internet revolution? Curation. The shop owners choose very carefully what to sell, based on extremely limited space. Etsy purports to be the same idea on the internet, but they'll let anyone who wants to sell on their platform. THEY'D BE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE IF THEY DIDN'T. But for the same reason that I buy less on Amazon and more from brick-and-mortar stores, they're finding that the CURATION is the key to VALUE. The problem of course, is that Etsy, or Amazon, or ANYONE who has a PLATFORM -- like Apple -- has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual customers. It seems that an easy "gate" to erect on the platform would be to limit how many chochkies you can sell per month. It would seem to be a fix for people who are trying to use volume and SEO to take over someone else's product idea. Someone here could probably blow a hole in that idea, though. But if it's a site for personal hobbyists to sell something on the side, then you have to come up with rules to CURATE the content to produce that outcome.

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But... That curation is a VERY expensive task.

Etsy is for artists/creators. If you add curation to the mix one side needs to take a hit - and it ain't going to be your wallet.

Basically the reason for Etsy to exist is "direct to consumer" model, with low intermediary overhead and 0 setup hurdles.

(If you ever tried to get a product on a supermarket shelf, that's how it is to get onto a successful curated store shelf)

I would argue that for artists all their work is already curated if they built it themselves and hence they wouldnt need to curate stuff

But if i am selling someone elses stuff, then i am in the business of curation.

You're right. But we are talking about Etsy taking an active role in what is available on their site, which is curation. Not an easy task as well.

They also decided to be way more lax, than some people want it to be.

Etsy may be compromised these days but it still IS for artists/creators as you say. We have a stand alone website that gets 2 to 9 visitors a day and our main Etsy site gets hundreds every day. That's why we are on Etsy. We are too small to hire comprehensive SEO/advertising help (I've tried a few) so we let Etsy collect the main slug of customers. We employ 4 people full time.

What kind of products do you sell?

Bootleg game boy games.

Underrated comment lmao

we make furniture out of old wood

Therefore it should be clear that the rise in fees is a reasonable tradeoff, for access to more potential customers.

I understand the desire to make sure that goods are authentic, but that is the only reasonable argument in the whole strike manifesto.

Looks like Etsy made $160M last year. I think they can afford to ramp up their efforts in this area. But, like the Apple App Store, people are only going to get satisfaction if they can make a big enough stink on social media.

A) Why should they?

B) Are investors not allowed to make any return on their investments in form of dividends?

> Why should they?

Because otherwise their brand is asymptotically approaching just being a more expensive Ali Express.

The brand is established and it's not that heavily diluted... Even then - it only needs to keep up with the aesthetics and product types, to keep on top.

So no... They don't need to. And curated storefronts were many - I knew of at least 5 startups in that space - they all folded.

> Why should they?

If they do not, many sellers will stop using them. Many buyers will stop using them. They will have competition.

You're basically arguing for a monopoly now.

Let them fail.

As a consumer, I don't want to go through the effort of finding the next Etsy. I want to be lazy and have the current Etsy be good.

Whatever comes next will be small. They will lack some of the things I want for many years.

As a lazy person I want sixpack abs, without putting in the effort.

Also - monopolies are never good.

If shouting at the sky had a chance to convince God to endow me with abs, I would make it a daily practice.

Etsy does listen to it's consumers, at least some times. The cost of complaining here is commensurate with the potential benefit.

"They should do this thing in order to continue to succeed."

"Why?"

"Because if they don't they'll fail."

"Now you're arguing for a monopoly."

You can't possibly be arguing in good faith at this point.

You have to ignore the "They will have competition." to make your own bad faith argument.

PS: And then miss our further interaction

Is Etsy paying dividends?

Etsy is also for curators, though (at least a specific kind). You have always been able to sell vintage items on their platform, and antique sellers are curators and restorers.

Before manufactured goods were on the platform, you were basically browsing items that were either handmade or hand curated. It was a much better experience.

Etsy is really for everyone, but the brand image is that it's really artists sales channel.

Based on my experience, curators add an extra 50%+ to the price of a product. Which is the cost of well curated storefront.

That is the cost of doing business. Without the curation they risk losing their customer base. Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap rather than handmade things?

Maybe, but Etsy is part of a long line of businesses that think they can solve adversarial search. The fact that Google can't and is losing the war should tell you everything about your chances. As long as you never use the "discovery" half of their business and find shops elsewhere, IG, TikTok, it's a fantastic experience. Basically Shopify but a little more streamlined.

> The fact that Google can't and is losing the war

Google has zero incentive to actually win that conflict, as frequently the SEO spam serves up ads from which google directly profits.

> Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap rather than handmade things?

You don't go there. They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?

Let them fail. It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...

I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.

Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past they've done a great job living up to that promise for me, and I have to assume others have had similar experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium knockoffs and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose our business.

So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer Etsy over other options.

Capitalism DOESNT fail! This IS the system. In the presence no rules, people will converge on the lowest common denonomiter. The problem with Estsy happens to any platform that gets popular. Its been happening in the real world since the 1990s where large coperations have moved in on mom and pops. Curated gets undercut.

There is no way around this in the free market. Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE. Its about making people consume. Making people want sh*t that in reality they could live without. Overloaded by stimulii, people break. People want the dream. They hear about the dream. People want the cheapest thing so they can 100x instead of 2x. People who knock things off want the most popular thing. This is competition working. Its a race to the bottom or we sacrifice infinite growth. There is no other way. You either create new markets, create new consumers, or steal other peoples cut of the pie. "Disruption".

Please stop writing in caps, it makes your comments look more agressive and rant-like than you probably intend, and it makes it hard to read for me and likely others.

It’s not hard to read per se but I just can’t read it in any mind voice other than someone yelling right in my face.

Every human made system and most every non-human system fails in some way at some point depending on the stresses put upon them.

I don't disagree that 'race to the bottom' is the rule rather than the exception in modern capitalism, but I don't think your response here captures the context. The fact that Etsy's decline into something like Amazon (which has truly embraced the race to the bottom, enabling it to thrive) was more-or-less inevitable doesn't change the reasons I've used it in the past, or the reasons I may be less likely to use it in the future.

do you want to go back to "mom and pops" shops in lieu of supermarket chains? I don't. I would like supermarket chains to treat their employees better and I'm willing to pay 10% more for it.

Multiple times each year I rent an inexpensive cabin at one of our state parks, and on the way here I always visit a small grocery store in a small town that carries a local Amish bakery’s goods. I absolutely love their bread.

This past weekend I noticed a Dollar General had popped up nearby. They’re like weeds in rural Indiana.

I have no doubt that within a year or two the small grocery store will be gone, and I’ll no longer have a convenient place to buy that bread I like so much.

Yes, I do want to go back to mom and pop shops.

"Mom and pop" shops offer sub-par and high overhead products, almost exclusively.

Dollar General pops up, where people are very, very, price sensitive.

That "mom and pop" shop is either for tourists or is taking an unreasonable rent off the local economy.

I now live in a rural area and I like my local artisanal stores. But they cannot sustain the economy, due to very high overhead.

> Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE

Apple is not an ad company, Tesla is not an ad company, Microsoft mostly isn’t an ad company, Netflix isn’t an ad company.

There are very few of the large companies that are ad companies.

> I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.

And my experience with Etsy is that it's a crafty people selling low quality handmade stuff.

Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.

> Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.

Well, that's your loss. But it may be Etsy's loss, too, if they allow chintzy crap from overseas to drive the quality sellers off their platform. Amazon has embraced the race to the bottom, so I don't see anybody else competing effectively with them without (at the very least) being all-in on Chinesium.

> It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...

Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not a good reason to ignore doing something that your business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with buyers).

You don't need to say that you're invested into the brand, for me to see it by the terminology you use.

> They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?

They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're just a shitty ebay.

Except that is not what the word curated commonly means...

If that were so - then your local supermarket is a curated store. (which would be a preposterous claim to make)

I see an opportunity here. A website who wants to curate products could use Etsy to locate sellers and convince them to list on their site. That curation website could develop a "stamp of approval" brand and grow that way. The art seller could include a printed note in the delivery saying "find more products like this on this xyz site". That way you use Etsy to draw in new customers but keep them as repeat customers for other products on this curated site. The main idea being that the curated site would not have to spend nearly as much money on advertising that Etsy does. Might work.

It's kind of how topsites used to work back in the day

This assumes every customer has that discernment. No shortage of potential buyers end up on Etsy because they saw something cool, asked the person where they got it, and the only answer they received was "Etsy".

Well, yes it is. And it works just fine on the "mom and pop shop" scale. But the whole idea of the post-2008 startups is to "disrupt" the industry by replacing the knowledgeable people with algorithms and minimum wage employees.

So what is the bottom line? Consumers get to enjoy products that are 2x cheaper and 4x worse. Individual makers get priced out and have to join the drone ranks. And the corporate owners of trademarks and algorithms rake in so much cash they don't know where to invest it anymore.

Sadly, this is happening across every sector, and most people seem to be just fine with it.

Curation is expensive, and difficult/impossible to automate, but there's value in it, in a world where anyone can post anything anywhere. We all felt better using Amazon ten years ago, when we could trust reviews, and trust products, but now it's flooded with brand names like "UZOOG" or whatever. People generally liked Facebook more before their grandparents and weird uncle got on it.

Look at Reddit as a platform which has many well curated 'subreddits', almost entirely for free.

It's totally possible on an e-commerce platform. Just nobodies quite managed it yet.

This has in some ways been a roll filled by subscription boxes.

The reason it works on reddit is because there is not money to be directly made by tricking the volunteer curators. If those reddit mods were controlling who could sell something, there would be a lot more effort going into corrupting them.

I still think you're right, Reddit has a much higher signal to noise ratio than almost anywhere else on the internet. But there's absolutely money to made by paying off mods of larger subreddits to curate content in such a way that makes their brands look good.

Artists and creators are Etsy’s brand. But those sellers have not been the bread and butter of Etsy’s business for ages.

I still occasionally find small sellers on Etsy whose stuff interests me and I always wonder why they choose to sell via Etsy and I’m sure it’s: because it works and because it’s less hassle than the other options. The traffic to your shop is worth swimming in a sea of knockoffs and doodads. And that’s what you compete with on the internet at large anyway.

This is why I buy music related stuff (e.g. cables) only from Thomann. Amazon more or less relies on vendors to fill out metadata like product type, cable length, plug types and communication standards, and the result is that the Amazon product filter is often just horribly fucking broken. Meanwhile, Thomann does all that curation work on their own, and it's just a breeze to use.

Our biggest electronics chain Conrad however... oh jesus they have gone really downhill some years ago with their website design - the search is broken, metadata for parts are (sometimes completely) wrong, and to make it worse even the in-store staff has to rely on the website instead of a dedicated ERP software which means if you are searching for a part with specific specs (e.g. temperature) even the store staff can't help you any more!

Thomann and the like killed my local music instrument stores. I don’t think Thomann will go away, but it depresses me that it is nearly impossible to find an instrument I want to purchase to test without travelling 5 hours. And I live in a capital city.

Thomann started out as a small music/instrument/stage tech store, too - but unlike their competitors, they fully embraced the future instead of showing the typical German skepticism towards change.

I mean, I get your pain. But on the other hand I'm just sick about the Mittelstand complaining that online is eating their lunch... they have all sat on their wealth and glory and thought they had carved out their forever niche guaranteeing themselves profits without having to do anything any more, and every single one that collapses fills my heart with a bit of joy.

I live in the northeast and we seem to still have local music stores offering the usual mix of instrument sales and service, lessons, sheet music and other supplies, etc. If I understand correctly from casual conversations with the owner of our local store many of them make a lot of their revenue renting instruments to local school students.

A couple of years ago, I went shopping for headphones. I went to a couple of different small electronics/audio stores, and none would let me try the headphones!! They had them in the plastic packaging and said they are not allowed to open them.

What the fuck!

I just left and bought something online.

(I know there are high end hifi shops that will let me try headphones. But I wasn't looking for 500€ headphones, I just wanted something that didn't sound like shit. Thomann is perfect for that.)

I mean, you could have bought them. Tried them out while in the store, then returned them if they weren't to your liking. But I'll admit that might be more overhead than you were hoping for. But it would also be a great way to communicate to the store that their policies are bad. "I'd like to return these. Nothing really wrong, just don't like them. Oh, and I'd like to try...I mean buy these headphones. ... Actually, I'd like to return these please [etc, etc]

You're assuming the store would accept the return and even if they did, they might not do it for the same price; a (restocking) fee might be charged.

I am assuming that. In most countries it's required that you can return non-consumable items in a sensible time-frame. Restocking fees vary in legality, but typically need to be disclosed before purchase.

HiFi shops won’t let you try anymore either. People come in to try them and then just buy them online.

Record player sales are booming though, according to the shop I went to.

> People come in to try them and then just buy them online.

It still puzzles me how much of a disconnect exists between e-commerce and brick & mortar, almost 25 years from Gates's "Business at the speed of thought".

Those people who come in the store should be converted right there and then, by making it trivial to order in-store a home delivery option that is price-competitive with non-b&m-equipped businesses. Keep razor-thin local inventory that commands a premium for the fact that you get it there and then, and everything else can be ordered. This should allow you to offset a decent amount of showroom costs while still competing with web-only operations.

If the price difference is small enough and the friction low enough, making the order in-store becomes a better option than leaving, sitting down somewhere, searching again for the item on some other store, etc etc.

There are still big opportunities out there for retailers who can figure out that sweet spot.

Yeah, but who's going to buy them in an opened package and at what discount (loss for the store)?

> Thomann and the like killed my local music instrument stores.

I think that's a good thing. The business of "holding things in a building" that are occasionally purchased and don't benefit from last-mile caching should go the way of the dinosaur. It will be good to get the space back. The thing that's really needed is a community space but the economics of it are hard unless you're selling stuff. My city tries to promote this stuff with arts council grants.

But Thomann doesn’t stock what I want, and the stores that carried it died, so now I am no better off.

There is value in being able to check out the thing you want, in person, before you buy it for a lot of things.

Most artist markets feel the same as Etsy, the majority of stuff is made in China too.

I'm tempted to say not to mistake local tourist traps for high quality goods.

This is tough, as a lot of artistic items have quality control that is purely subjective. But, often these places are not much more curated than the vendor room of a convention. There will be some nice things; but claims of curation are all too often over sold.

That reminds me of an idea that I sent in to Apple, via their bug reporter (you can submit suggestions).

I'm an Apple One subscriber. I only listen to Apple Music during my morning three-mile walk (45-50 minutes). The rest of the day, I'm working, and I don't listen to music, then.

I use their "Create A Station Based on This Song" feature, like Pandora. It generally works fairly well (I think Pandora works better, but they also limit skips -even for paid subscriptions).

I like to hear obscure, indie, music, from artists off the beaten path. I tend to immediately skip, when I get a song that is in my library, or that I've heard a lot (like the song used to create the station). I also tend to skip a lot, anyway, because a lot of undiscovered music is obscure for a reason.

One time, I was listening to relaxing, wordless, techno/trance, and a freaking Lady Gaga pop song plops in, like an airborne gift from a dyspeptic, incontinent, buzzard. The only possible relation to what I was listening to, was that one of her band members was maybe playing a sampler. She's a talented artist, and all that, but that was not what I wanted to hear. It was quite jarring.

Someone is selling eardrums. That was probably an AI hiccup.

In any case, my suggestion was to create "Undiscovered Music" stations, so you say "Play more songs like this one, but ones I've not heard before, and are definitely not in my library."

I would want to hear indie tracks, and songs from obscure artists. I listen to a lot of different types of music, and most of my tastes are heavily represented in the indie space. I often find it difficult to discover music that I'm not already familiar with.

I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless. They'd probably kill it, soon afterwards, because "Nobody uses this service."

The current push for "Bigger, Louder, MOAR!" is something that does not favor craftsmanship, Quality, or independence.

> I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless.

Why would they do that? It would be massively unpopular, per your own comment, so I can't understand why that would be a commercial move.

It's not even like an indie radio station selling out, because a radio station is at least (usually) an independent competing entity. It's more like a record shop inexplicably filling its death metal section with madrigals.

It would simply lose those customers who liked it, and not even gain any others, since pop customers want the opposite thing (and are already amply catered to) so wouldn't even click on it to begin with.

> so I can't understand why that would be a commercial move.

In my experience, "monetization" people Just. Can't. Bear. To. See. Anything. Not. Making. Money.

It seems to be something that causes them physical discomfort, and they regularly destroy so many good things, by trying to make money from them.

Call me a cynic.

It's likely the music platforms' data is showing them that users vastly prefer explore+exploit lists vs just explore. If you're in the small minority who wants to listen just to new music, there are plenty of curated playlists you could select.

Asking for an all-new list is akin to asking for a HIIT workout plan, but without the pauses.

> there are plenty of curated playlists

I've had issues with these. There's so many spammy, garbage playlists, that it's impossible to pick out the good ones (and I have found gems, but it's a lot of work).

It’s ok to leave money on the table. Trying to be all things to all people isn’t tenable.

My pet rant of late is a lament that companies seem incapable of having a conversation about achieving profit versus maximizing profit. In the ideal, companies that achieving profit can treat their employees and customers well; however, companies that maximize profit shit on everyone in their blast radius for that almighty dollar. How sweetly bitter is the teat of capitalism...

Just in case you weren't aware, if you surround a word by asterisks, you can emphasize a word without YELLING

     *hello* there

Becomes

hello there

Thank you, for responding in a more productive way than I could have.

Honest question though, when is it ever appropriate to yell? Have you seen people ever do it? I think the all caps could be a useful tool for emphasis. Would I do it though? No.

So! How's your first day on the internet going?

I think yelling is appropriate if someone says they're thinking of building an Electron app. That's the only reason I can think of.

It's never appropriate here.

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Of course, uppercase is appropriate for an acronym or initialism that actually is spelled that way, such as SEO in the comment we're replying to.

OK, but how do I surround a word with asterisks as an example to others without emphasizing the word inside?

A backslash before the asterisk makes it appear as an asterisk

\*this\* becomes *this*.

And before you ask, to show the backslash, you add another backslash. \\*this\\* becomes \*this\*

I did not know you could backslash-escape asterisks (TIL! thanks!), so I prepended it with 4 spaces to make a code block.

>has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual customers.

This will never happen with Etsy, Amazon, or any other publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible. If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will. If you want a platform like you are describing it will have to be privately owned.

> Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible.

I feel like this is in semi-myth territory. Yes, there have been cases where shareholders have sued company leadership because they weren't making them as much money as they could. But it's not quite as clear-cut and well-tested in the courts as you make it sound.

In fact, the case law goes firmly in the other direction.

Management has a ton of latitude to run the business as they see fit. The "remedy" for bad business decisions is supposed to be divesting and starting a competitor, not the courts.

Cases like Dodge v. Ford or Caremark are odd because the board was basically not running a business at all: Ford flat-out said he was doing something not for the business, but in support of his philanthropic beliefs. Caremark was so asleep at the helm that they racked up a quarter-billion dollars in silly fines.

Anyone can, of course, sue over anything, but if it's even vaguely legitimate (and the "facts" in Shlensky v. Wrigley are pretty bonkers, IMO), they won't win.

>Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919) is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a charitable manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism. [Wikipedia]

Yup, but the facts of that particular case are tricky. Ford refused to issue a dividend to the Dodge brothers because

   "My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the  
   benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
   number, to help them build up their lives and their homes."

This isn't a business decision; it's an ideological one.

It's been argued that if he said less ("No, just no"), or a bit more ("And this will let us recruit the best workers/expand our customer base/etc"), he would have been fine. This commentary lays that argument out nicely: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/603

That meme also contrasts with the rise of modern ESG, where a lot of shareholder pressure on management teams has been in the direction of making less money. There is a lot of really interesting stuff out there done in the name of ESG, EXFY being a particularly good example.

“fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible” No they don’t. That’s an oft repeated myth. The have a responsibility to manage in the best interests of the business. That’s pretty vague. On purpose.

In my experience it's just a repeated line to excuse companies for not thinking longterm or about anyone/anything beyond immediate revenue. It's very silly and not what the term means at all, yet as you pointed out, we see it all the time.

There's a "however". Actions that reduce the shareholder value without any long term prospects is something that will drive down investment and could trigger lawsuits

A lawsuit does not indicate a breach of law or anything really.

>without any long term prospects

Of course. Because by definition you’ve sacrificed the short term and the long term for nothing. But I don’t think anyone here would debate that so I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at.

As much money as possible over what timeline? Crank profits now at the expense of the long-term business? Lose profits now to improve long-term business?

It isn't a straight-forward call to make. The current status-quo with resellers might be making money now, but there will be long-term brand damage in exchange. Will their business still be viable in 5 years if they develop a reputation for being Aliexpress lite?

If you are publicly traded and don't have leverage (e.g. different share classes with different voting rights for the founders) it's a straighforward call to make. Optimize for short term profits or be replaced by someone who will do.

> Optimize for short term profits or be replaced by someone who will do.

No. Optimize for shareholder value.

Amazon shareholders, for instance, are happy to make little in way of profit because Amazon management has shown an ability to increase the value of the enterprise.

In general though, the market is legitimately skeptical of most managers which is not a bad thing.

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

> If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will.

This is exactly what happened at Etsy when they fired the previous CEO and installed Josh Silverman.

They are being downvoted because "make as much money as possible" is not a clear cut proposition. Apple ran (runs) an expensive recycling program and investors complained that it wasn't valuable at annual meetings. Steve Jobs said "We disagree" but he wasn't replaced. Lots of companies don't maximize the dollars out of every single thing, in response to a bigger picture / longer term vision, and it's up to leadership to sell it to shareholders.

Etsy could certainly argue their bottom line in the long term will be helped by curating a higher quality marketplace and getting rid of junk sellers, if that's a problem.

Steve Jobs earned the ability to say that.

Most managers are not Steve Jobs.

Sure, but some are so pretending no company can ever push back against a short term cost cutting / revenue focus is false.

I had the same thing happen[0], but the point is that companies don't have to make as much money as possible by sacrificing everything else like brand image and human decency; anything that goes against obvious profit-increasing practices must be properly accounted for by the board giving a reasonable explanation. A hypothetical shareholder meeting: "Q: why did you reduce your cut of sales when still trending upward in user and revenue growth? A: we believe higher user growth numbers is more important in the long term and envision our revenue growth will continue to increase despite this change".

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30893551

>Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible.

There has been this odd trend over the last few years of mischaracterizing what this means/what that duty translates to. People talk about it as if every CEO has to redline the company at all times and never think about longterm consequences for literally any reason. Every single cent that can be extracted right now must be extracted or the investors will rise up in all their anger crying out "FIDUCIARY DUTY!" as they drag the poor CEO off kicking and screaming.

Companies can think longterm. They're allowed to sacrifice short term profits for sustainability/longevity. I don't get where people get this idea that they can't. To me, "fiduciary duty" has become almost memetic - it's some weird hand wave-y line people throw out to excuse businesses being short-sighted, as if they never had a choice.

Whether it's a legal requirement or not, companies definitely act as if it is. Setting a company on fire to acquire short-term profits with a golden parachute guarantee is the pattern for executives of public companies under American capitalism.

Oh let me be perfectly clear here, I know that that is how things often shake out, especially in the US. What I am talking about is the way people defend businesses that behave this way.

They act as if they have no choice, that there is some legal mandate to just wring out a company all day every day and damn all consideration beyond “I can make another dollar this second.”

> Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible.

That is not accurate. They are required to operate in a manner that is satisfactory to their owners, who delegate that responsibility to the board of directors, who then set policy for management to execute.

There is no difference between a publicly traded and privately owned company in terms of the responsibilities of the management and board to their shareholders.

There are numerous incentives to maximize shareholder returns (eg taxation incentives, equity value improvement, dividends), but there is nothing in law or otherwise that applies a fiduciary duty to management or the directors of a company to maximize either dividends or capital value.

It's called the Friedman Doctrine. It is true corporations don't have a legal prescribed duty to maximize shareholder value. However, the Friedman Doctrine is, much like Moore's Law, a norm from which any deviations are considered aberrant and for which the reactions range from disappointment to frustration.

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