Constant Tinkerer V2.0

This is a brief follow up to my recent post on “Enshittification”, and how it seems inevitable in capitalism. With cycles of companies starting, booming, and busting over the years, I’d like to expound upon some of the issues with current company organization and structure that I’ve noticed. Maybe there are solutions to this problem, within the capitalistic structures that are so hard for us to escape!

Problem: Highly concentrated voting stakes in companies

Facebook kind of sucks now, right? Guess who has a majority vote though and can make a decision at any time that shareholders or his board may not be happy with – that’s right, Mark Zuckerberg. Even though Facebook is a “publicly traded company”, it’s practically meaningless, because you can’t buy a significant enough stake in Facebook for your voice to matter at all.

This isn’t how publicly traded companies were supposed to work, at least from what I remember learning in school. They were supposed to be a mechanism not only for folks to support companies with their investment dollars and decide on their futures, but for employees that became shareholders through their equity stakes to have some say in how the company is run too.vote

Not to mention that Facebook bought up all viable competitors over the years and effectively has had a monopoly on social media, so it’s next to impossible to even start a viable competitor with a different vision or ownership structure.

These highly concentrated ownership stakes distort the problems of Enshittification even more and make “voting” each quarter on company issues a practically meaningless exercise.

Problem: Platform Users aren’t shareholders

Simply put, the users of your platform are very rarely the shareholders of your platform. Take Reddit as an example. It is a private business. Tencent owns 5%, “Advance Publications” owns 30%, and who knows who owns the rest.

Reddit’s users are pretty upset with CEO Steve Huffman. But these users have no real voice in voting on the fvoteuture of the company in a way that would force him to take any action on recent API pricing changes impacting indie developers. Maybe a rare few of these users own some shares due to previously being employees, or they were co-founders like Alexis Ohanian and not only still have some stake but still use the site. But not nearly enough to vote and force any action from Mr. Huffman. They also can’t easily change the decisions of Tencent and “Advance Publications” who might be pushing for these enshitt-ifying changes themselves, likely due to their motives for the company to turn a profit. You can’t argue with a capitalist for wanting to be profitable, but shouldn’t its customers have some say in how that happens?

Possible Solution: Creating a new type of corporate structure that was at least partially owned by users, where they could “up vote” solutions to company problems and at least have some voice in how the company is run

Perhaps some users would value a platform like this more than one governed by corporate laws that were invented mostly when business was conducted via the mail and telephone. Not to mention others that were created when Facebook was raising money at higher and higher valuations, with investors basically having no choice about corporate structure if they wanted to be included in that round.

Sure, the current Reddit ownership would probably never convert to a structure like this, but maybe a new business under a corporate structure of “User and Investor owned” would take off! I think this has more of a shot than a federated Reddit replacement like Lemmy (sort of like how Mastodon is the federated replacement to Twitter). Again, I really feel that the average user does not want to have to run their own instance or server to use a service like Reddit, they just want to use it and enjoy it and not think about how it works.

Possible Solution: Limiting the voting stake one individual could amass in a company based on how large the company is, or some other metric that proxies its influence

Some may argue that early stage founders need to have a modicum of control over their companies when first starting out. But once you’re able to influence elections worldwide, I don’t think one individual should be able to choose your direction at their whim, leading to the layoffs of 10,000 workers among other negative consequences.

Collective decision making is a hard problem, but if we can’t trust our governments to build and operate services like this, we should try to make at least public companies more accountable to the public, or create legislation that does so once they reach a certain point of influence over our lives. It would also be nice to have private companies be more accountable to not just their shareholders, but the users that provide value to their service.

In Sum

My last post felt a bit more defeatist – capitalism has won, we have to bow to it, things eventually get enshittified no matter what. But maybe we can change capitalism to not just reward shareholders and power-tripping founders, but to result in more effective corporate structures that actually enable companies to last for much longer and keep a high bar of quality by allowing their customers to partially govern them.

In a world of easy to vote on corporate elections powered by platforms like Say Technologies, it’s a practical proposal. Sure, we could argue that the platforms that we collect the votes on could be more secure or better run to discourage hacking this process. But we can keep improving on the security of online share voting platforms over time.

Overall, I would like to see less of powerful founders/CEOs and huge investment groups making all of the decisions about how the platforms that have become instrumental to our day to day lives are run. Isn’t that what living in a democracy is supposed to be all about – having a say in how our lives are run? Sure, we could vote with our dollars, but with network-effect incumbents making competition ever harder, that becomes a harder and harder option to credibly say that we have. I hope legislation is introduced soon to reign in the incredible power of these individuals and the wealth behind these companies, not to mention to introduce more user-positive corporate structures around internet companies.