Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

I mean it’s the Walmart model; be cheap early, get less cheap over time.

My 5,000 foot philosophical take is because they were never making money in a day to day business way and relying on low interest rates to inflate values through money shuffling schemes to game attention.

Over time models made it apparent they would never make long term business sense as software improved and automation took over, so it’s a medium term pump and dump jobs program fueled by low interest rates to attract information workers into providing them code shapes to train AI that writes code and let big tech own all the copyrights.

So we’ll have MPAA/RIAA owning all art, and FAANG or whatever owning all technology. A modern patronage system kind of sort of.

Not saying it’s good or bad. Just an attempt at a meta viewpoint of society.

Substack in particular seems to have pulled a bait-and-switch in terms of strategy. Their original line was "Each newsletter is a separate publisher and separate business and we're just a platform. You can take your list and leave at any time." But in the last months they've been rolling out feature after feature designed to bind publishers and readers tightly to Substack as a brand: A reader app, app-only chat, checkmark-badges for high-sellers, semi-mysterious (algorithmic?) promotion features for driving subscriptions, etc.

At this point it seems like actual email newsletters are kind of a nuisance to them, and they're trying to be more Medium than Medium.

I miss Medium. I do find myself clicking on search results that lead to Medium posts, then immediately clicking 'back'.

It makes me feel a little sad every time I don't look at something there. There are a lot of Medium posts written by people that clearly thought (or think) that they're writing a blog that's available to all, when they're not.

This is what people mean when they about "Late Stage Capitalism":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

Yes, this trend is increasing. And it's essentially a long-term consequence of the laissez-faire capitalist model of attempting to govern almost entirely via the profit motive. It strongly incentivises businesses to prioritise profits at all costs (and those who don't will be outcompeted by those who do). And while most businesses will prioritise value-generating activities in their attempt to generate profit, eventually that isn't enough and so they turn to aggressive user/consumer hostile approaches.

Can we do something about this? Yes, we can regulate and heavily penalise companies who do this. We can also bias the economy towards smaller companies (through progressive taxation on businesses) who are much less likely to engage in such activities as they tend to be more connected to their customer bases and subject to much stronger competitive pressures.