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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

Communities that form around a website or service are living things - they need nourishment to thrive, and can certainly be killed. The only sustainable way forward is to form artist-driven, bottom-up, non-profit organizations to nurture communities like BandCamp.

The rule is: every for-profit company will lose its way in the drive for higher and higher profits, or it'll be killed for having not kept that promise. It's inevitable. Every company in existence now will die one day.

There's no guarantee a democratic organization would last forever, but at least its not subject to the artificial drive to grow forever.

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There is a premise that the myopic optimizations beloved by economists and MBA's eventually paint companies into a corner and then they die.

Sort of the classic way naive lost hiker in the mountains will walk downhill with it getting steeper and steeper till they slip and fall to their death. In the case of a companies they run on thinner and thinner margins until some event drives them negative.

> The only sustainable way forward is to form artist-driven, bottom-up, non-profit organizations to nurture communities like BandCamp.

It will only work if there is laser-like focus on the primary organizational objective: letting artists make a living.

Falling of a cliff when blindly chasing growth is just one problem. In the current era, the probability that they will get involved in policing the politics of their members and issue statements on everything from the state of rain forests to Palestine is close to 1.0. The organization will thus be torn apart by internal rivalries.

> form artist-driven, bottom-up, non-profit organizations to nurture communities

Unfortunately those sort of things (that are genuinely good) attract the wreckers like a flame attracts a moth.

Businesses always need to grow in order to deal with ever-increasing costs of running the business. (Rent hardly ever goes down, salaries hardly every go down, costs of services hardly every go down, etc etc.) There are only so many ways one can cut the cost of running a business, and most of them mean not keeping the status quo for employees and making it worse for them.

> Communities that form around a website or service are living things

when a living thing stops growing it starts dying

a person who becomes a gluton will grow bigger and bigger as they age and die

a person who watches their health might become smaller and live longer and better because of it

the growth first mindset is not wise

You can still have unhealthy growth.

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