I think like, the death of Vine and Rabbit, Wikipedia constantly needing to beg for money, Discord depending so heavily on venture capital, Facebook turning towards spying on users to generate a return on all the venture capital that got them started, Adobe creative suite turning into a subscription rather than a single product you buy, the strangulation of streaming entertainment as every company pulls their content and makes it exclusive to their service, are all great examples of how like, it really doesn't matter if something is legitimately useful, efficient, or beloved, it is next to impossible for a service to exist if it doesn't make shareholders increasing amounts of money year after year. Which may seem like a "no duh" type of statement, but it's a very simple window into how the profit motive makes products and services worse, not better. And how that's not just a matter of certain companies or ceos being bad and greedy on an individual level, but is an inescapable factor of an economy where existence is dependent on generating capital.
Can anyone honestly say that a service they've used has gotten better in the last ten years?
If so, please tell me about it, because I'm not aware of it.
Tumblr. Slightly. At least, it hasn’t gotten worse.
Annoyingly it’s not even making shareholders money.
Facebook gives no dividend.
Adobe gives no dividend.
Disney gives no dividend.
Google gives no dividend.
All of these companies’ holders have ZERO incentive to make a company actually produce long term; it’s all about stock price, which is all about valuation, which is all about making things LOOK big and flashy and expensive. When you buy these stocks you get NOTHING from the company in return. Your only way to make money is to hold it and sell it for more to some unsuspecting rube who will also get NOTHING.
Force all stocks traded on the NYSE to give a real dividend based on earnings, watch as the market radically calms its tits.
Wikipedia is a nonprofit (like AO3), which is why they need to ask for donations to keep operating
Tumblr hasn't made anyone money for investors (rather, it's cost companies a ton), which probably corresponds to why it's gotten better
and frakkin' YES to the idea that if we can't dispose of capitalism entirely, we need to at least make publicly traded corporations pay dividends to stockholders - the way the stock market operates today is ridiculous and unsustainable. the Second Law of Thermodynamics states:
in all exchanges, "if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state" (aka entropy)
that is, greedy investors seeking to extract profit from a system (aka a corporation) cannot take more than the profits without exceeding the entropic potential of that system - in nature or the universe itself, it's just not possible. so when Greedists extract profits from selling stocks at prices exceeding a corporation's profit value, they're literally taking money that doesn't exist
that then drains the larger system (the world's economic system) of its energy (in this case, wealth), leading to "corrections" (recessions) or worse, until the system recovers from the energy debt
if we eliminate this one issue by only allowing profit from stocks to come from dividends (it's like profit-sharing for investors), that would solve so many problems with capitalism
then cap leadership income at, say, no more than 10× the lowest-paid employee (including temp workers to avoid that loophole), and we could cure what's wrong with Greedist-based capitalism, ending up with a free-market socialism hybrid economic system that's vastly more sustainable than the current one
this is how we evolve away from greed-based economics toward an equitable distribution of wealth