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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Just a regular story of capitalism and platform enshittification.

Whenever a platform is owned by shareholders who then need to extract rents from the ecosystem, this will happen. Whether it’s couchsurfing or twitter.

Expect it to happen to Reddit etc.

There is a direct line from the profit motive to platforms becoming enshittified, promoting the most outrageous content and making people emotional and angry.

The AI is just another level of appropriating human work. Whether it’s google’s disruption of publishers through AI-generated answers, or OpenAI training on artists’ work.

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Is "profit motive" that different than "survival motive"?

These platforms need money to survive. Automattic, the latest owner of Tumblr wrote a great post on all the things they've tried and how Tumblr is still losing $20MM a year IIRC.

That’s only in the capitalist system.

Wordpress by that same Automattic doesn’t need money to survive, in the sense of money going to one large corporation. Anyone can self-host their own copy of wordpress, buy plugins etc.

If you want to know more about how to monetize digital content without a trusted central actor, we are working on a Web2 version of that ecosystem btw: https://qbix.com/ecosystem

Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.

I persevered with your website because I am very interested in the ideas, but I have to say it was very hard going. Thousands of words about abstract concepts could easily be reduced to a few hundred or spread across multiple pages. The only comprehensive list of services actually on offer is a PDF? The videos describing the merits of these decentralised services are accessed through image links to YouTube! There's lots of low hanging fruit to improve usability for those less patient than me in my humble opinion.

That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities or https://qbix.com/invest for instance).

Sorry the experimental stuff is not slick enough for you yet, we don’t have the resources of Facebook or even Automattic. We worked very hard for 12 years on the foundations at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform but I am sure you can find many faults there. (I’d like to hear about them btw.)

On the other hand, many other projects like the E programming language, Capn’proto, Linux etc. are also very complex and did not have fantastic and slick documentation, first adopters also had to read some words in order to get it.

This is an open source project. You are welcome to reduce the words and make a summary. Perhaps when we start marketing to a broad audience, we’ll reduce it to 10 word slides and sound bites, or jingles.

Until then you can try it yourself, the documentation is at https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide

I see a lot of information about how to distribute content and revenues, but I don't see how you ensure that enough revenue comes in.

Wordpress' Tumblr problem is that costs exceed revenue, not distribution.

Note that "decentralized" doesn't reduce total costs - it just spreads them out. Server costs do not go down with the number of owners.

Tumblr: bought for $1.1B in 2013, sold for $3M in 2019. Now losing $30M a year.

Even if they make money, the next quarter must always be better than the previous one.

At a certain point, people seem to start looking at self destructive options to make that happen.

Automattic is not publicly traded.

It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking better then you are doing worse.

Inflation is one thing. Rent extraction from the ecosystem isnt done only because of inflation, but because investors want profits from capital appreciation. That’s one of the failure modes of capitalism. Sure it works well in early stages (providing capital to promising startups) but there are diminishing returns and ultimately huge negative externalities to this model of stock ownership forever. Whether by pension funds or the public, the incentives are just toxic.

A lot of social media platforms lose money because they decide they want to grow above and beyond, even after being well established. Same thing for other software products that are perfectly fine, even loved.

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