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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

They’re responsible for the existence of scribd. Not aware of any other obviously socially net negative companies.

For the uninformed what’s the deal with scribd?

Scribd are quite annoying. The pitch was "the YouTube for documents" allowing stuff to be posted and shared but they tend to try and get subscription money off you to see anything unlike the likes of YouTube.

Scribd scrapes the web of all the .PDFs that it can find, then gates them behind a paywall and SEOs their way to the top of Google's rankings. That's it, that's all they do. They run a zero value tollbooth with other peoples' IP, taking advantage of users who don't have the search-fu to hunt down the documents themselves.

They should pretty much die in a grease fire.

Flock

Airbnb

I think when making the claim a company is a net negative, it's necessary to explore what would have happened if the company hadn't been founded.

I find it unlikely, for example that there would not be a dominant centralized forum platform. People would have certainly started problematic communities on the dominant platform, and it's unlikely a platform with strict moderation would have gained dominance before 2015 or so. I do think a dominant player would have been established by 2015.

Do you think whatever you see as harmful about Reddit would not have occurred if the company didn't exist?

It would have happened more slowly at least, delaying the increase in populism, nihilism and depression in the Western world, the anglosphere in particular.

That's mostly imputable to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Reddit is a footnote in the mainstream, which is dominated by those 3.

Given the number of Reddit users across the Anglosphere, I disagree that Reddit is not a major contributor.

What traits specific to Reddit as opposed to a hypothetical generic alternative forum platform do you think are major contributors to those social trends?

Recommendation engine pushing users into ideological bubbles, public voting mechanism creating incentive for conformity which then creates purity spirals, lack of moderation.

Early Reddit had a recommended tab, but that didn't last long. The current recommendation features are relatively recent - this decade at least.

It would surprise me if the winner in that space didn't have a public voting mechanism. Digg, Reddit's early major competitor had one, and heavy-handed moderation surrounding the HD-DVD decryption key leak was one of the major inflection points that drove users from Digg to Reddit. Stricter moderation during that time period would have been a losing strategy.

This is like saying “that guy would have died eventually if I didn’t murder him.”

The corporate shield for accountability is so annoying in this way. Nobody’s ever responsible for things that they did as human beings.

This comment assumes both that Reddit is harmful and the outcomes were predictable. The former is debatable, but I am sure the latter is not true; the founders of Reddit didn't know what they were building.

They thought it was a social bookmarking thing for people to find and share blog posts. It didn't even have comments for the first half year. For two more years, self-posts only existed as a hack where the poster had to predict the post's ID to make it link to itself. User-created subreddits didn't show up until about 2.5 years after the site launched.

I’m pretty sure all endless scroll social media has been scientifically proven to be harmful. Reddit also runs a 1:1 copy of TikTok.

I don’t really care to defend the morality of extremely wealthy VC firms like YC. They know the enshittification process that happens with 100% of the companies they fund.

They could create companies with charters and ownership structures that ensure they exist to better the world and make good products as their binding guiding principals, but they choose not to.

More fun with this subject: https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...

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