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Comment by andrewmutz | Hacker News Reader

You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.

Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.

Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.

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Is that the reason Steam is still loved by users? (not sure how long that’ll last tho)

I think the fact that Valve is still a private corp is a big part of it, yes. It allows for continued ownership by people who have meaningful beliefs of what it means to do something the Right Way and who run the business accordingly. This isn't to say that private corps are always "good" like that - the temptation to go for easy pickings and enshittify is always there. But some owners at least won't do that for various reasons, while a public company seems to always end up chasing short-term profits above everything else.

Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.

> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.

Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.

Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.

>purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.

I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.

It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".

Shareholders may not want it, but management usually does want to make it look like they had a great quarter.

If shareholders didn't want it, then they wouldn't appoint (or keep in place) the top management that repeatedly and consistently makes those choices.

Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.

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