Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done.
Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.
I know this can be a touchy subject for people on the American left, but there is likely a reason human history has not produced a whole lot of organisations with independent governance outside of capitalism. At least I think you will be hard pressed to find examples of it if you go looking. I know because I’m a left leaning Scandinavian who spent a lot of my youth looking (including a minor in history).
That being said, organisations like Twitter are the worst examples of capitalism. At least in my opinion, in that they are companies that do not generate a profit. But instead plan to, somehow, sometime, generate a profit for their investors. It’s essentially like running a non-profit organisation without any of the moral obligations. Obviously a very cool idea here on HN considering this is a venture capitalist site, but maybe not so good for humanity as a whole.
The reason is that capitalism actively undermines any competing type of organization. Organizations which build sustainable and ethical products or services are quickly driven out of market when capitalism offers competing products or services for free.
While carefully airbrushed from public discourse the very function of capitalism is absolutely predicated on the legitimacy and protection granted by the collective. Every time an "important sector" gets bailed out you have a direct confirmation of our deep inter-dependencies. Privatizing profit and socializing loss is proof of the deep prevailing immorality of the "system". Yet there is nothing that says that all those financial inventions must degenerate into obsessive profit-seeking.
Capitalism is a broad set of contractual arrangements, information flows, monetary accounting and the like, that facilitate economic function. Almost everything in this toolkit is configurable (via legislation and regulation, but even more so by widely adopted moral behavior) to the most minute detail. You could have for-profit employee owned corporations for example (they do exist and they work just fine).
Blaming "generic" capitalist tools is similar to blaming digital tech as such. Both are manifestations of "social tech" but what you do with them depends on your moral sandbox. You can legitimately blame php for its limitations as a technology. But you can use php to write mediawiki or to write facebook. You can piggy-bag on PageRank or LLM to sell targeted ads or opt to empower every person alive with new and powerful information processing tools.
I think people adopt non-profit status to immunize against a metastasized environment where anything but the most rapacious behavior is dead on arrival. But it really does not have to be this way and it wasn't always that way (in space and time). In a sense it is an extreme measure which realistically and unfortunately (in the short term at least) cannot become the norm. We really ought to fix capitalism. Even if our digital sphere was a benign utopia, we face horrendous environmental sustainability problems that the current version of capitalism has absolutely no idea how to fix. Hopefully there will be a well researched and objective Wikipedia article on how to do this :-)
It's the same with reddit.
Sure, running Reddit isn't cheap. But the value it generates dramatically outweigh the costs. Despite this, it's difficult to finance it without making the site considerably worse.
They aren't corporate projects.
Luckily you can just log in to the communist internet, invented before the capitalist one and with way better content and potential. Right?
I'm just noting the that the most valuable websites on the internet are relatively nonprofit.
I merely illustrated that the web was invented and ran by a capitalist society, the internet you see today is a product of capitalism, the good parts and the bad ones.
Unless you can link me websites created and ran from countries with different systems - that you had in mind as being superior.
Huh? Capitalism is literally a state of economic freedom. People accumulate capital via consensual economic transactions, then decide what to do with it (stuff like funding Wikipedia!). How is this contrary to a free society?
Now if, for example, Hacker News would ask me to pay 0.001 USD to receive this specific stream of bytes, I guess that would be "capitalist internet". Perhaps it would be a good idea, who knows, I'd sure like to be paid for putting content out there for large language models to sweep in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#System_...
... This is why I love Wikipedia. It teaches me new things every day.