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768 points cyndunlop | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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bitmasher9 ◴[] No.43105534[source]
It’s really impressive how well Bluesky is performing. It really feels like a throwback to older social media platforms with its simplicity and lack of dark-patterns. I’m concerned that all the great work on the platform, protocol, etc won’t shine in the long term as they eventually need to find a revenue source.
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autobodie ◴[] No.43105649[source]
Absolutely. The profit motive is the root of most evil. It is a shame that so many are trained to believe it is the only motive available.
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gkoberger ◴[] No.43105691[source]
I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company.

I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Bluesky itself! However, as this post shows, it's a lot of work to build on the prototype... so if not them, who? And if someone else, how will they become sustainable?)

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1. bbor ◴[] No.43106085{3}[source]
I totally get/relate to your perspective, but to be the annoying leftie in your ear:

A) Sustainable revenue is a requirement for any company, yes, but the unlimited (above-inflation) growth demanded by most large corporations is absolutely not. Lots and lots of companies operate for a long time without expecting massive growth, raises n' all. MBAs pejoratively call such companies "lifestyle businesses"--as in "just pays for people to live"--but I'd call them "normal, healthy companies".

B) More fundamentally: the idea that a social media network can only be built by a single corporation owned by investors is an omnipresent, yet extremely toxic, assumption. Mastodon represents another extreme end of the capital<->labor spectrum where anyone can contribute to the network at any time with their own instance, but I think Bluesky is a hint of a less-pure--and therefor more feasible--future.

To use the language of my favorite dream, Chomskian Anarcho-Syndicalism: imagine a social media network organized by a democratic non-profit entity akin to the Python or Linux Foundations, that then contracts out work to a hierarchy of smaller, purpose-built teams ("syndicates"), each of which may in turn contract w/ other teams. Each team would have to attract talent and negotiate enough income to pay them sufficiently still, of course, but there would be no team leader to make a surplus profit from the system -- any "surplus" would stay at the non-profit level, and thus necessarily be reinvested back into the product.

In the current system, the reason Bluesky didn't do this off the bat is obvious: no one would loan them startup funds, as ownership investment is the de facto universal way to start up an unproven venture. But we can dream bigger and better, IMHO; both on a smaller scale by building upon already-proven open protocols like AT Proto, and on a larger scale by structuring the state & economy to support this kind of model equally, if not primarily.

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2. jarjoura ◴[] No.43106785[source]
All of the big tech companies today are the result of 100s of smaller, well intentioned tech companies that got acquired into these behemoths.

I always look at how WhatsApp played out as the company. They were the good guys, and didn't want to get acquired. Zuckerberg, almost bankrupt FB at the time giving into all of the ridiculous demands WhatsApp made. No one at WhatsApp thought it was going to happen, until it did and did result in a once-in-a-lifetime transfer of wealth to several hundred employees.

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3. JustExAWS ◴[] No.43110208[source]
WhatsApp was acquired for $20 billion in cash and stock. Facebook was worth $170 billion at the time. The stock part of the acquisition wouldn’t have any real financial impact on Facebook.