Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

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My theory is that there are three regimes: Not Scaling, Scaling, and Antiscaling.

Not Scaling is about crossing and shoring up your moat. Scaling is when your app has enough hype around it that your customers recruit new customers, and all you have to do is add new machines or shard the database or whatever to handle increased demand.

Antiscaling is when you turn into the thing that everyone hates about the modern web. Antiscaling is when intelligence agencies want to talk to you about how your chat app is used by terrorists, when cities want to licence access to your ridesharing or takeaway delivery app, when pieces of legislation are passed that are specifically designed to target your company, when you're sufficiently well-known as the founder of an app that people are making memes about you and tracking your personal movements.

You don't have to take over the world, you just have to make money. People who try to change the world often change it for the worse; just try to make something useful, and maybe the world will like it.

> you just have to make money.

When a measure (e.g. profit) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

-- Goodhart's Law.

I have not seen profit used as a misplaced target in Goodhart’s Law before.

The typical example is something like headcount targets that lead to employing or laying off some of the wrong people.

I think that profit is more of a force like gravity than a future target that distorts strategy.

An argument could be made for the wrong “time horizon” of profit. Target quarterly profits and you might cannibalize your business. Target profits to far in the future and you might go bankrupt.

But in the general case I mostly agree with you. Sometimes though, businesses reach a market saturation level where “making the line go up” every quarter is bad for the health of the business.

It may not be the usual example, but I believe it an apt one: shrinkflation and other kinds of forever "cutting costs" to the detriment of everything else is so normalised it's a cliche. We expect planned obsolescence now.

Infinite monetary inflation ensures this. It's literally baked into current global monetary policy.

in this case it is apt though because the actual goal is not turning "into the thing that everyone hates about the modern web." according to the antiscaling category but the metric given for avoiding that is making money.

profit is usually not the misplaced metric, because profit is the goal.

But if you have another goal such as well-being of the people of your country then you might set up GDP measures and call it a success when everyone is miserable. (I know GDP does not directly measure profit, this is in the nature of a real world example how something usually not thought of as a Goodhart's law measure might actually work)

Its a not a target for your company, its a target for capitalism in general.

Every economic systems aims to benefits society in general, and capitalism claims that (to great extent) free market allocation of capital is the best way to do that, using profit (or net increase in capital) as the optimizing function.

Well, when that measure becomes the target, it can get hacked, where profit can be maximised without getting closer to the intended goal. So you can make a very profitable company that just makes society worse. And alot of times that happens when these companies see regulations designed to limit their damage to society as just restrictions on their profitability, rather than understanding that the real goal of their company is to make society better, and profit is just the carrot hanging in front of their individual hamster wheel.

I feel this is an insanely distorted take.

How about extreme and utter irrelevance (such as after building a thing nobody wants)?

Or how about this, arguably the most common: slightly successful; nobody hates it but nobody loves it either. Something people feel mildly positive about, but there is zero “hype” and also no “moat” and nobody cares enough to hate it.

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