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Comment by UberFly | Hacker News Reader

The best version of Etsy is long gone. Hand crafted items from their original source just won't satiate IPO investors. There REALLY needs to spring up a (good) Etsy alternative that's content to be what it is and not an exponential growth machine that poisons the roots they originally built on.

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> Hand crafted items from their original source just won't satiate IPO investors

Plenty of public companies promise low growth but decent returns. (Some promise wind-downs amidst payouts.)

They also pay low multiples. If you want a high multiple, you have to grow. Etsy’s saga isn’t a problem of public markets, it’s one of a company choosing a particular cohort of investors.

>not an exponential growth machine

This is increasingly impossible under capitalism for fundamental reasons, which are illustrated most clearly in modern financialized capitalism by shareholder interests.

Your desires (and mine) will require a reorganization of society as we know it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation

> Your desires (and mine) will require a reorganization of society as we know it.

So far every attempt to do this has done the exact opposite.

Nonsense. Capitalism was a great success compared with feudalism. It is outright defeatist, senslessly conservative, and frankly anti-scientific to insist there is nothing more to be done merely because it has yet to be realized.

> It is outright defeatist, senslessly conservative, and frankly anti-scientific to insist there is nothing more to be done

Nobody said that. It’s just that I haven’t seen a better proposal to date.

So long as you aren’t proposing things that were tried extensively in the last two hundred years and failed every time.

> increasingly impossible under capitalism for fundamental reasons

Most of capitalism, historically and today, is about preserving capital and making a small return. High-growth ventures are a minority, despite how it feels in tech.

In 1995 the richest person in the world was Bill Gates with $13 billion. Today there are 10 people who each have more than $130 billion (including Bill Gates), and 70 people who have more than $26 billion. Jeff Bezos himself has $200 billion (and this is after the divorce).

Inflation over the past 30 years (since 1995) is 105%--prices have doubled. Global wealth has doubled (inflation-adjusted) too. But these centi-billionaires are a whole new level.

Nonsense. The majority of my capitalist friends who own businesses work their asses off to build a company that reliably generates a 15-20% operating margin and then spend the rest of their career making sure nothing and nobody breaks their cash generating machine. The only people I know chasing returns far beyond the rate of inflation are VC-backed and private equity-owned businesses, where the parent firm is competing with other investment firms.

Plus VCs don't beat the market in general. A few of their companies do and the vast majority fail. Their value used to be in being less correlated with the broader market which made them a good diversified investment.

Tindie is a good replacement for some things.

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