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Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm.

The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.

We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.

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They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking something good and making it shitty is one way to make money doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.

I think the point is that if we want this to stop happening, we have to address the cause of the problem, not just complain about its effects.

to put a finer point on it: capitalism.

"then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.

to put a finer point on it: capitalism.

That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions.

What we have now is no paradise, but it's not a disaster either. It's balanced on the razor's edge of disaster, however.

I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded corporations with limited-liability and low friction on transfers of ownership."

However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.

For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.

Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.

I mean they don't know up as perpetrators.

In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.

But the cause isn’t simply being for-profit. There are plenty of for-profit enterprises which make good products.

If I were to propose a cause, it would be the normalization of internet stuff being “free”.

And yet, when YouTube cracks down on adblockers, people on here get outraged instead of just paying for Premium. Everyone keeps saying "just let me pay" but when the option exists, it seems like most still avoid it and stick to complaining.

I read that in their battle with adblockers, the YouTube team seems to have broken Premium at least once. I think they were accidentally showing banner ads to Premium users.[1] It seems kind of odd, but wouldn’t your money be better off being spent on helping the ad-blocking effort rather than paying websites that seem to offer a gradually worse experience for everyone who isn’t blocking ads?

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...

Yes, that's certainly an odd argument. Why would I do that when I'm happy with the service I'm paying for? Especially when it's the best way to support the creators I enjoy, since they get a much bigger share of revenue from Premium views than regular views.

I don’t trust or like the company. I expect them to drive up the premium price in the future, make it inconvenient to use multiple devices, etc. so I’d much rather steal their stuff.

This person is trying to clarify that the problem isn't specific to Fandom, it is a general problem with our system of capitalism and will never go away until we change our system of economic incentives.

Basically, sell everything of value to make a quick buck is the guiding principle of our economy at present. It's the best way to get rich even though it ultimately makes society way worse off long term. We have to solve this on a fundamental level or things like Fandom will just keep happening.

Can we stop this capitalism boogeyman thing? Market economies don't force people to conduct business this way. We've had our current system for a long time and while corporate raiding has always existed the current epidemic is very recent. Its the result of a complex confluence of market, legal, regulatory and competitive forces that make it an ideal move for many businesses.

Fandom is unusually bad even in a sea of bad ad-laden websites.

> These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do

I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.

Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.

I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.

I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable- there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are definitely possible.

Yes, when I said "what happened" I was referring to how quickly the site changed for the worse and how extreme the decline was, not just the fact that it has ads. Most sites do follow the pattern described in the parent because they can't escape the need to make money, the transition is usually very gradual and they often stop at the point of sustainability, rather than pushing to the absolute maximum of short-term audience-destroying profit.

@zoeysmithe I'm sorry for the mass downvotes though, I think you are basically right. I still think it's worth noting private equity ownership because while we can't really choose what economic system we're in, we can often choose to work with people who care about more than just profit.

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