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The User Always Loses

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Re: The User Always Loses

#81

Post by benjaminjosephw »

jtolmar wrote: post #66
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #16

The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value". Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem…

I think the worker co-op model has a lot of potential for tech startups. They're more stable than other ownership models, and the desires of the workers tend to be more aligned with consumers than the consumers are with investors (and obviously a worker co-op is far more aligned with the desires of the workers). The primary advantage of venture capital is access to capital for growth, which isn't a great fit for pure…

This is exactly the kind of thinking we need. We've been blinded to possibilities like these because of dogma and tradition but maybe it's time to seriously explore alternatives.

Does anyone know any tech ecosystems/communities promoting a worker co-op model?

Re: The User Always Loses

#82

Post by iamthrowaway »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #74
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #16

The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value". Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem…

Here's a perhaps weird take that I'm not convinced of myself, but it's interesting food for thought. Maybe the big companies pay so well the floor is just that high. Let's say you, a hopeful founder, could get $0.5M/yr at a BigCo. Instead you're going to start a company where you'll earn maybe $0.15M/yr for a decade then either get a payout (10%) or fail (90%). To make them even in expectation after that decade, you…

Well, as someone who just left a 750k USD a year at a FAANG with a clear path to making 2MM+ in 5 years or so, I disagree.

I am in my early 30s and have a wife and kids. At some point, your relationship with money changes. I am now more concerned about my own legacy and the example I’m giving my kids than whether my net worth in 10 years will be 2 or 20 million.

I’m also more deliberate about how I use my time. So I’m perfectly content in doing something that will net me “only” 250k or so a year.

The irony is that this might net me more if I decide to come back to a FAANG in the future.

Re: The User Always Loses

#83

Post by tomcam »

rdiddly wrote: post #80
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #16

The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value". Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem…

Can we not just say it's greed? "Some people are greedy" and leave it at that? In a sufficiently small and self-governing community, that kind of asshole would be sanctioned, exiled or killed. In a large industrialized society that can't reach any consensus whatsoever on any issue except that economic growth is essential, and that makes that growth its sole unassailable objective, you will get user-hostile software,…

> Can we not just say it's greed?

IMHO we can't just say that. Because nothing is stopping us users from paying for email, online document storage, blogs, etc. It would appear to me that greed is one cause, and an unrealistic expectation that infrastructure should be free, or at least an all-you-can-eat buffet, is another cause.

Re: The User Always Loses

#84

Post by fmajid »

The author certainly likes the sound of her voice, doesn't she? Not to mention that AOL CDs are as relevant to today's surveillance-industrial complex and dark patterns as Monteverdi's Vespers.

Re: The User Always Loses

#85

Post by NineStarPoint »

tqi wrote: post #20
superkuh wrote: post #7

So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the articl…

But for many of the core criticisms of large tech platforms like Facebook/Google/Twitter self hosting and federation doesn't really address the problems (fake news, fomenting extremism or conspiracy theory, harassment, discrimination) so much as make it so that there is not a single entity to villify.

And if you remove them from Facebook/Google/Twitter, they’ll still make their own side sites and keep spreading those things anyway (see: Reddit->Vote). The value of those things not being present in easy central entities is that it heavily limits their ability to easily spread.

Re: The User Always Loses

#86

Post by TeMPOraL »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #54
jasode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns [...] VCs are not the root cause. You're not looking hard enough for counterexamples . Examples of software companies that didn't take VC money that many consider to be "user hostile" are: - Intuit -- see 1-star reviews on Amazon of annual Quicken releases and forced upgrades of bugg…

What sort of "root cause" analysis goes for the human nature of a founders? Yikes, are we that overly-focused on the individual? Let my say the obvious, all those non-VC companies are publicly held. So let me get to the heart of the matter, if you have investors, they will demand returns on their investment. And if you don't have investors, you will have to compete externally (e.g. users) and internally (e.g. salarie…

I.e. if you want to survive, the market will keep you in lockstep with the worst of your competitors on the market. So ultimately it still boils down to "problems of unconstrained markets".

Re: The User Always Loses

#87

Post by rdiddly »

tomcam wrote: post #83
rdiddly wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not just say it's greed? "Some people are greedy" and leave it at that? In a sufficiently small and self-governing community, that kind of asshole would be sanctioned, exiled or killed. In a large industrialized society that can't reach any consensus whatsoever on any issue except that economic growth is essential, and that makes that growth its sole unassailable objective, you will get user-hostile software,…

> Can we not just say it's greed? IMHO we can't just say that. Because nothing is stopping us users from paying for email, online document storage, blogs, etc. It would appear to me that greed is one cause, and an unrealistic expectation that infrastructure should be free, or at least an all-you-can-eat buffet, is another cause.

It's a good point; we can't really escape the fact that it costs "effort" to do things that create "benefit".

Although if I still stubbornly try to view this through the prism of greed, I note that it doesn't necessarily fall apart. Like maybe a user's wanting something for free is a form of greed, and the company that bases its business model around that, is really just turning that greed to its own advantage kind of like an aikido master throwing you ass over tit using mostly your own energy!

Mind you I don't want to imply or pretend I considered any of this ahead of time or intended it as part of my GP comment.

Re: The User Always Loses

#88

Post by bleepblorp »

jasode wrote: post #32
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #16

The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value". Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem…

>The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns [...] VCs are not the root cause. You're not looking hard enough for counterexamples . Examples of software companies that didn't take VC money that many consider to be "user hostile" are: - Intuit -- see 1-star reviews on Amazon of annual Quicken releases and forced upgrades of bugg…

The real problem here is excessive governmental tolerance of monopolies and the lack of an adequate regulatory/legal regime to protect end-users from harms caused by vendor-lock in.

All of the companies you mention have near-monopolies in their respective sectors. Hundreds of years of economic history show that monopolies are extremely harmful to their customers.

Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets.

Microsoft continues to be a problem because the US government decided, 25 years ago, that stopping Microsoft from abusing its operating system monopoly was unAmerican.

Companies, like people, follow incentives. The incentives created by strong copyright and patent law, combined with the deliberate unenforcement of anti-trust laws in the United States, prevent competition. Without competition, customers always lose.

Getting users a fair deal means changing the rules that define the software market to consider the needs of users rather than only the wants of vendors.

Re: The User Always Loses

#89

Post by eesmith »

danielhua wrote: post #18

"Let’s admit it, we are all in the persuasion business. Technologists build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people 'users' and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making." --"Hooked" (2013) The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users…

While it's a well-known and indeed snappy aphorism, many years after I heard it, I found out that in the mid-20th century, librarians used the term "users" for what they now call "patrons".

For examples: from 1952, "A public library user is defined as an individual twelve years of age or over who used either a branch library or bookmobile during the thirty days preceding the interview." (Quoting "Rural reading habits; a study of county library planning, Prince Georges County, Md.", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&vi... )

From 1931, "This was the first complete triple asyndetic dictionary catalog. It became a favorite with town and mercantile libraries, the idea always being that the user was searching for some book he knew about ..." ("Outline of the history of the development of the American public library", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&vi...)

From 1928, "Consider the User of Bulletins", title of a letter to the editor in Science - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/67/1724/40.2 .

Maybe it wasn't specific to library science either. I just did a broader search for "user" and found, for example, a 1905 ad for a book of tables for surveyors and engineers: "The computations enable the user to ascertain the sines and cosines for a distance of twelve miles to within half an inch, and this by reference to but One Table, in place of the usual Fifteen minute computations required. This alone is evidence of the assistance which the Tables ensure to every user ... " https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&vi...

Re: The User Always Loses

#90

Post by take_a_breath »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #81
jtolmar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the worker co-op model has a lot of potential for tech startups. They're more stable than other ownership models, and the desires of the workers tend to be more aligned with consumers than the consumers are with investors (and obviously a worker co-op is far more aligned with the desires of the workers). The primary advantage of venture capital is access to capital for growth, which isn't a great fit for pure…

This is exactly the kind of thinking we need. We've been blinded to possibilities like these because of dogma and tradition but maybe it's time to seriously explore alternatives. Does anyone know any tech ecosystems/communities promoting a worker co-op model?

Always wish we talked more about Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), in the US. Maybe there is a startup idea in making this type of program easier to implement, like Stripe Atlas for employee ownership. Imagine, further, if our tax law incentivized this type of ownership structure instead of incentivizing dividends and capital gains.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compa...

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