Comment by cadamsau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cadamsau | Hacker News Reader

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VC backed companies need to return money to VCs, and public companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. There's no long term equilibrium in a regime that single mindedly focuses on one incentive and demands growth of that one objective.

As social beings, we are subject to a wide variety of constraints. Why do we keep acting surprised-pikachu when corporations, which aren't, are sociopathic?

The cure would be to balance fiduciary duty against other incentives. This will happen as disillusionment grows, but as it stands it'll be regulation - slow, unsatisfying, static, and disempowered.

Instead I see a future of enshittified products being swiftly replaced by solo motivated people - or small teams. Suddenly we are back to disruption. Instead of "Google sucks, all I can do is complain on my blog" you can say "Google sucks, I made this alternative give it a shot".

Especially since LLMs can code now. We genuinely can get there. Make something in minutes, pull in some of the open data that's out there and things do get really interesting.

For example. Google Maps recently started showing ads when you're driving - ick. What else is out there? OsmAnd is a maps app with high-quality OpenStreetMap data, but (without meaning to offend) its UI is not up to my personal standard. It's certain that with a few weeks of focused effort one could polish its UI and give the world a third solid maps app.

This is Hacker News, we have the skills and the right level of disrespect for the status quo, we can disrupt!

> and public companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.

Public companies have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of its shareholders, maximising shareholder value doesn't mean "in the short term by handicapping long term health" as we currently live under from the management/financial class (and capital investors). The concept has been bastardised, i.e. Boeing's management acting the way they did the past decades has not maximised shareholder value, it has extracted value at the cost of the best interests for shareholders in the long term.

Unfortunately there's no easy way to curtail this behaviour that I can see. Even more when everyone's retirement plan requires being part of the financial market game...

As you mentioned, the incentives are not there for actual maximising shareholder value on the long term, we now see these cycles of healthy growing companies being captured by the financial market when going public, after that it's a process of extracting value in detriment of the health of the company long term, sometimes this process is accelerated, sometimes it makes the company languish for decades, and sometimes the company becomes something else that is still profitable but "evil" in most moral frameworks.

> its UI is not up to my personal standard

Have you tried https://organicmaps.app/? It has the same data source, but ui is cleaner.

I hadn’t thought to try it for driving, thanks for the suggestion!

Looks like it has potential based on a quick test at home, will give it a go on the next car trip.

>Instead I see a future of enshittified products being swiftly replaced by solo motivated people - or small teams. Suddenly we are back to disruption. Instead of "Google sucks, all I can do is complain on my blog" you can say "Google sucks, I made this alternative give it a shot".

There's practical limits here. You're not going to be building your own search engine any time soon that challenges Google's, or even Bing's.

However, if you want to replace Google Photos, you can absolutely do that with Immich or Photoprism. It won't be trivial though: you'll need to build your own server (or create an instance somewhere), do a lot of setup, figure out how to allow access to your server from the internet so your phone app works and your friends can also view photo albums in links you send them, etc. (assuming you want to replicate all these GPhotos features). But it is do-able, and many people have done it with the existing software and guides.

OsmAnd is an interesting project (and not really Free BTW), but it doesn't do important basic things like give real-time traffic updates.

So I think some things are more easily done DIY than others, but as people work on it, more and more things can potentially be done on systems you control yourself.

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