Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Unfortunately, for most technology startups there are exactly two ways to pay salaries to the developers: getting investors (which lead to the exact cycle that I explained earlier) or paywalling the site up the wazoo (which leads to the community being necessarily smaller than it could have been otherwise).
Use a hybrid system. Market up until a service reaches a certain size then have government step in as the nationalising buyer to hand over ownership to the company’s workers. A lot these services should be treated as utilities anyway, image hosting has gone through this cycle so many times I’ve lost count and imgur is on its way out too now. It’s a fucking image host, it hosts images. That kind of shit should be a simple public service. It’s a utility of the digital age. Don’t get me started on Amazon reaching a very obvious inevitable saturation point that is based on the size of any given population and the average consumer goods range of a country.
Of course I know this can’t work under capitalism, because the ideology of the capitalists will result in them intentionally fucking this up.
And even with no capitalism involved in the equation, how do we convince the government to get taxpayers to foot the bill for something as mundane as an image hosting service? Especially in an environment where even art and education are being severely restricted in cash flow due to them being “non-essential services”?
As aptly explained by writer Cory Doctorow:
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Unfortunately, for most technology startups there are exactly two ways to pay salaries to the developers: getting investors (which lead to the exact cycle that I explained earlier) or paywalling the site up the wazoo (which leads to the community being necessarily smaller than it could have been otherwise).
Use a hybrid system. Market up until a service reaches a certain size then have government step in as the nationalising buyer to hand over ownership to the company’s workers. A lot these services should be treated as utilities anyway, image hosting has gone through this cycle so many times I’ve lost count and imgur is on its way out too now. It’s a fucking image host, it hosts images. That kind of shit should be a simple public service. It’s a utility of the digital age. Don’t get me started on Amazon reaching a very obvious inevitable saturation point that is based on the size of any given population and the average consumer goods range of a country.
Of course I know this can’t work under capitalism, because the ideology of the capitalists will result in them intentionally fucking this up.
And even with no capitalism involved in the equation, how do we convince the government to get taxpayers to foot the bill for something as mundane as an image hosting service? Especially in an environment where even art and education are being severely restricted in cash flow due to them being “non-essential services”?
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