• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Google was the first example I thought of, because they were founded in 1998, solidly before the dotcom crash. They survived because they hoarded data.

    My point was that every company going into the bubble thought they had a product they could monetize, but virtually all of them failed in favor of just hoarding everyone’s data. Amazon and eBay were competing for ecomerce supremacy, but now even they are just privacy violators for various reasons (amazon via AWS and Alexa, eBay in the interest of detecting malicious account behaviour).

    MySpace is an example of another unsustainable social media model in the vein of many dotcom era services. They died out as soon as Facebook realized they could hoard everyone’s data.

    All roads lead to privacy nightmares. It’s the fossil fuel of the internet, and enshitification is the climate change.

















  • How are you differentiating stakeholder and shareholder? The employees are certainly shareholders.

    Valve doesn’t really hire “grunts”. The people who are actually considered employees of valve are very few and highly skilled. The number of Wikipedia from 2016 is very out of date and estimates 360. But valve’s LinkedIn still says “over 300”.




  • I think this post massively overestimates the power a CEO has. The CEO is beholden to the shareholders. Valve is private, so and its shareholders are its workers. It would be useful to know how many shares Gaben has of valve, but I still don’t think the next CEO would suddenly also be the majority owner.

    Also, I know things have changed a lot in the last 12 years, but 12 years ago regarding the total dissolution of Valve, Gaben said:

    “It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate."

    Also, forcing users onto windows is THE way to kill valve’s profits. The whole point of the Linux push was a direct response to the windows store, and msft’s threat of forcing valve to give them a cut of purchase through steam. Msft will still do that the first chance it gets. So even the most profit-minded new leader wouldn’t make that choice, as it’s plainly shortsighted.