Scale Ruins Everything

To be honest, you could say this about capitalism in general. Everything has to be huge no matter what industry it's in or what the product is, just because shareholders demand that impossible infinite growth.

It's not capitalism. It's government bonds. If you can get a guaranteed return from bonds, then any risk must beat the bond market. That increases the cost of capital for businesses, so they have to produce greater returns.

Human nature in most big culture seems to be trained to demand more (even if not always money). If there was any group of people that were "content with what they had", they were outpaced in development by the ones that "want more" so there will be minor (or inexistent) now.

I do wonder if there is any smart solution to this issue.

Good observation.

The answer is at the beginning of your statement: "human nature".

In plain English: there's no solution to that.

Bad observation.

Stop projecting, you two.

Just because you want to take take take from others doesn't mean everyone else is.

Your comment is quite confusing.

The observation is that the "take take take" behavior arises out of a sort of survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. Both preceding comments seem to lament this, rather than relate to it.

I think this could largely be an issue with public or VC/PE funded companies. There's plenty of private companies of small/mid size that make plenty of money but don't feel a need to grow excessively. You could think of the local plumbing company, or a small boutique consulting firm. They want to grow, but there's a natural barrier that's hard to cross without becoming a very large company and changing the nature of the company that the owner may be enjoying.

I have always wondered how that would apply to software companies though. If you make something that works really well and everyone wants to buy it, you could grow fairly large financially without needing a ton of people if you just focus on that one program that makes you successful. I imagine it's hard to not feel a need to scale up dramatically when you have millions of users/customers asking for new features.

Valve Corporation is one of such private companies, mostly known these days for its Steam game updates and store platform.

Being private didn't prevent it turning into a monopsony, ironically for the discussion, maybe because its competitors were mostly public companies (and so didn't care enough to do a good job) ?

They are not immune to walled garden issues though (SteamWorks), but maybe their private structure helped enshittification to proceed much slower ?

Right.

The gp made something up, the second comment affirmed it

I'm calling bs

Because I am human and they are lying on my humanity

Y'all are welcome to disagree with me on it

It's not about you. It's about another "type" of human. One that wants more. Maybe you don't (good for you, probably you are happier!). But the problem is you will need to "fight" against the other "type". What do you (personally) do then to prevent the other "type" grabbing more? Whatever other people like you tried during history (hundreds of years ago) seems not to have worked (the grabbing types are still grabbing in all culture I have sufficient knowledge of to comment on).