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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

The author is wrong. The CEO perfectly understands Stack Overflow. What the author of this blog doesn't understand is that the CEO is pursuing a perfectly valid strategy: maximize its short-term gains by squeezing it unsustainably with the latest hype, and take the money, and run.

The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.

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Why is this so common with tech companies? I'm not an economist by any means, but I never hear of McDonald's, Honda, Home Depot, etc. etc. pulling these kinds of stunts. They're perfectly happy being large companies that pull a constant year-over-year profit. Meanwhile tech companies seem to deliberately have a lifespan of years, not decades, with rugpulls like this being accepted as the norm.

Washing

Can you clarify/expand on this please? Like money laundering or something else?

This happens pretty frequently with all kinds of companies. Look at anything touched by private equity, for example.

Look at what Lowe's did with the Craftsman brand.

You won’t read about the boring, sustainable companies in the headlines.

These stories are common in headlines because it’s newsworthy, not because it’s common in general.

>Why is this so common with tech companies?

Venture capital.

Vulture captial

McDonald’s is an interesting company to mention. McDonalds corporate isn’t even really in the fast food business, they’re a real estate company. Franchisees have to rent land from corporate, that’s how they make almost all their money.

Individual McDonald’s Restaurants are barely profitable, most stores bringing in less than $100k profit per year. For how widespread they are, the restaurants themselves really aren’t a great business to be in.

Franchise owner makes 150k average on a store. Everything is purchased through corp so a tremendous amount of store revenue flows through them. The money for any land leasing comes from the fast food revenue.

That is to say, it's an overly reductive assessment that McDonald's is not in the fast food business.

Not only that, but their Board seems to make much of their money on adjacent business as well (such as required equipment).

Because long term companies in tech are seen as "not innovating" or "evil".

Ex : Microsoft (evil), Oracle (not innovating and evil), IBM (not innovating), Apple (evil)

Being a startup is seen as "good" by many people because you're seen as "trying", if you stay long and raise your prices, you're seen as "milking".

Microsoft is creating a lot of innovation by trying and failing (Windows phone) or succeeding (Office 365) but many people here see them as evil because they ask for money.

Ehh ... is Wikipedia seen as "not innovating" or "evil"? Craigslist? They haven't really changed their core model (except for Wikipedia's recent more minimal look, I guess, but that's a pretty small change in the last decade). Wikipedia went the direction that once they had more money than they needed to run it, they started to do other stuff. I think that's great. Once your killer app is hugely successful, stop messing with it. Focus on running it efficiently and reliably with a small crew, and take the ongoing income from that to try other things.

Yes, the companies you listed are viewed negatively, but that's not because they have a sustainable business model. Don't underestimate the many perfectly valid reasons those companies earned their reputations.

> Craigslist? They haven't really changed their core model

For what it's worth, in my local (smaller city, not a tech hub) market, Craigslist is basically dead, killed by Facebook Marketplace; and I'm assuming my market isn't the only such one. So it's possible that they will need to change their model, or at least how they execute upon it.

Funny: Craigslist isn't even loading for me at the moment, and DownDetector shows it's not just me.

I think it's about time that we no longer accept this strategy as valid.

Valid according to the type of capitalist economy the rich, powerful and money hungry want: one where everything revolves around shareholder value, rather than societal value. In that economy, it doesn't matter how destructive your business model is, as long as the shareholders get value out of it.

Friedman's idea that corporations that maximising shareholder value has clearly been the single most destructive ideal that has plagued this planet for the past half century, but to too many people in power it is still the rule.

It's also the reason why we still keep burning coal and oil, despite knowing that we're destroying our planet that way.

People were doing this long before Friedman was even born. People were doing it before capitalism as we know it even existed. Friedman's idea is just retroactive justification for one of the fundamental evils in human nature.

Who is "we"? Unless you have a large financial stake in the company you aren't part of the discussion at all.

We live in a society. If you want to build a company in international waters cut off from the rest of the world, by all means. I hear there was a nice anti-regulation company that has a boat they don't need anymore, so maybe you could take over the lease. There's a reason why we decided banks have to have be monitored and if they're insolvent they can be taken over, or why you have to IPO and provide a bunch of information to investors if you want to sell stock in your company. There's "private" transactions that create enough systemic risk so that we have to regulate them.

As SO contributors, _we_ have a say with regard to our future consideration of SO as a destination of our contributions.

Since SO is just a platform, it can't survive without _our_ content.

People have much more power than they think.

That only works if all SO contributors band together and make decisions as a collective bloc. At the moment you are only speaking for yourself. Most others who add value to the platform are going to keep doing so regardless.

If only there was something to enable lots of people to coordinate easily ... like ... a big computer network?

> The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.

Nor is the well-being of the company's employees, or at least the stability of their job and the foreseeability of their future.

It is one more example of a situation where a worker's union fighting for the interest of both the workers and the company (in the sense of the platform/product, not the shareholders) would be to the benefits for the longevity of the business and for the users too.

You have a pretty strange definition of ‘valid’.

Well, 'rational', I guess.

I’m glad you put it in quotes at least.

I'd say it's actually pretty typical of corporations operated by global investment groups.

“not outright illegal in every jurisdiction”

Classic Star Trek (TOS) exchange [0]...

Anan 7: I'm glad you approve.

Spock: I do *not* approve. I understand.

[0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon_(...

It was a poor choice of words. I didn't mean valid in terms of morally right. I meant valid in terms of economically rational in today's climate.

Thank goodness everything on the site is licensed creative commons, so you can stand up a replacement pretty quick. Mathoverflow even owns their own domain.

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