Is that the reason Steam is still loved by users? (not sure how long that’ll last tho)

Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.

> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.

Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.

Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.

These cycles have been going on a lot longer than the last 40 years. Everything eventually dies.

Rome used to rule the world; sure it took about a thousand years, but it ultimately didn't last.

> protecting us from harmful contents

In Soviet Russia government protects harmful contents from us!

Just one facet of what we call 'promotion oriented programming' (or promotion oriented design).

Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.

(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?

It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.

Most revolutions are merely power transfers.

But sometimes the incumbent crushes the revolutionary.

And sometimes the incumbent hires or bribes the revolutionary.

And sometimes the incumbent guts the revolutionary and wears his face as a mask.

They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.

Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.

Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.

I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.

Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.

[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.

In the old days, companies were valued on their expected dividend. Share prices didn't move that much, and trading shares took time and had fees attached. You could speculate on share price moves, and people did, but the primary source of income from holding shares was dividends.

Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.

The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.

I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.

[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds

> Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.

Google's original founders still hold the majority of voting rights.

Making trading less efficient wouldn't change anything here.

> It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.

No, your proposal wouldn't work at all.

A big problem is actually that most managers in most companies mostly work for themselves. It's called a 'principal/agent problem'.

Exactly as you say 'execs get more room to bullshit.'

Btw, there's private equity funds with very long capital lock-ups. Their effects on companies typically aren't loved by the people who voice similar concerns to yours.

AT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.

Biden's FTC chair tried her best, but it didn't go anywhere because she had no support and Trump put an end to it. But both sides amirite?