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Comment by aSanchezStern | Hacker News Reader

You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.

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> You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality.

The only person making any kind of assumption is actually you, by imagining that something is not possible or plausible because you project your personal expectations based on a personal notion of morality onto everyone.

If you take a step back and look at the scenario, you'll understand that nothing binds any third party to comply with your personal expectations, or follow your particular argument based on morality. Therefore your expectations are completely unfounded.

If you take a look at reality you'll find plenty of examples where projects which were previously open were afterwards closed and monetized. This is nothing new. Just take a look at, say, Reddit. Or even Twitter. Countless examples.

If you take a step back and look at your comment, you might realise that you are making the same point: businesses don't have to take any particular path...

The people who work at companies are usually not devoid of morality. Even the people who own the companies, the people on the board, the people who are the executives, are not usually devoid of morality. But insofar as the company is an organization of people rather than a person itself, it is devoid of morality. Organizations of people are not people, they are meta-organisms that have different ways of "thinking" and operating than the individual humans they are comprised of. Don't anthropomorphize these things, they aren't capable of morality in the same way that a bear isn't. If ever it behaves in a way that seems moral, that's not because it actually is.

The more people who are involved in the decision making apparatus of an organization, not just at the top but throughout the entire net, the less human you know it is. If the entire company consists of a single person, it is a person and not an organization. But if a company consists merely of one owner/operator with one employee below them that tells the other things and is told things, the product of those two becomes less than human and may make decisions that neither of the two humans would approve of if they had the complete picture of what was going on. The larger the organization grows, the worse this problem becomes.

This isn't only true of companies, but any group of people. Groups of people are not themselves people.

Far more often than not, businesses have compromised on their principles until there was nothing left of them. The exceptions prove the rule. Perhaps people have principles, but they rarely apply them at work, and if so they are swiftly replaced by more pliable employees.

agree with what you wrote but the problem becomes more complicated when API access becomes expensive to provide. basically it’s easy to provide something for free when no one is using it and no one is making any money. but when things start picking up then the real problems arise.

A for-profit business might be run by people who do care about ethics at any particular point, but one thing that we've learned over time is that there's absolutely no guarantee that those people will still be around tomorrow.

> This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century

What does this mean. What does Keynes have to do with moral companies? Is it made up?

Well, it's a pretty good null hypothesis.

And both people and boards can change for the worse.

Facebook and IG allowed 3rd party apps, until they went public. Twitter and Reddit did as well up to a couple of years ago, now they don't. I'll look to the real history of 21st century Silicon Valley companies over the theories of a dead academic from the Great Depression.

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