Have there been any serious legal efforts to make this less profitable? It's very clearly detrimental to society.

tmp10423288442 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why would it be detrimental to society? Many companies have developed all the products they're likely to ever develop, so why would you maintain the same level of operational costs as when you expected growth? There's no guarantee that the prices charged before the acquisition were sustainable either.

	▲	joelthelion 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They don't just maintain these products, they enshittify them to extract the maximum possible profit from captive users, until someone else comes in and builds everything from scratch all over again. This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not much you can do. The alternative is bankruptcy that does a similar thing to workers. But it at least doesn't let the company make blatant lies of a PR statement.

The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.

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WarmWash 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SaaS is the detriment to society. Static feature software continually updated and changed to create a faux justification for $20 of your money a month, keeping you on an endless treadmill to in order to work with all your old data.

Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...

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ImPostingOnHN 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Private equity (what's being described here) has more political influence than "society" because money.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Society has more money and way more votes than PE. I'm going to quote A Bugs Life (1998) of all things here:

> Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.

In our case, it's more like a million to one

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ImPostingOnHN 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I suspect that the free cash flow of those who seek fewer regulations of this sort on thing exceeds the free cash flow of those who seek more.

People that are being squeezed by PE have less money to wield as political influence partially because they are being squeezed by PE.

The ones doing the squeezing are ok with that.

The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough or don't have enough money they're able & willing to part with. They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to.

This is the local optimum.

	▲	johnnyanmac 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough That lack of care is going to cost us all in ways we'll be forced to care about one day. Not necessarily for Vimeo, but definitely much more important things that people are ignorant or actively turning their heads against. > They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to. We call them our represenatives. We expense it to them with our votes (and literal expenses with tax dollars we are forced to part with). But votes require care and we're back in the loop.

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epolanski 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is just how capitalism works in a competitive environment: it allocates capital as efficiently as possible.

I despise their business model, but it is what it is.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It really doesn't have to "be what it is". We can strive for actual change. But everyone's still too cushy for that, it seems.

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epolanski 5 hours ago | parent [-]

But what actual change do you want when the very founders of these companies like Vimeo, multi-multi-millionaires decide to sell their life's work, customers and workers very well knowing what the fate's gonna be, just to be even more wealthier?

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johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent [-]

To summarize what I put in another response: I personally care less about holding the multi millionaire into account (though I wouldn't mind it at all) and more about making sure employees over such deals aren't lied to and then have lives upended at the drop of a hat. Workers and customers do not in fact "know what the fate's gonna be" and that's the problem to address.

I won't repeat the same usual solutions again, but I'll mention one thing that already exists: the WARN act. The spirit of this is good, to give employees a 3 month buffer of when their job is ending. But it's clearly abused at worst, and not enforced at best. It's not as good as other countries' worker rights, but ot exists today to be looked at. In addition, severance can help to. This is standard, but even the "generous packages" in the US tend to be on the lower end of what other countries need to do.

Basically, it shouldn't be a drop dead easy decision for a company to mass layoff and have the workers surprised at the facs. It needs to both be slowed down and give immediate short term costs. That's a start of "kinda actual change" to strive for.

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epolanski 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Workers and customers do not in fact "know what the fate's gonna be" and that's the problem to address.

1. Bending Spoons model is known, everybody knows as soon it's announced

2. The company belongs to the shareholders and founders. It's them making the decision.

	▲	johnnyanmac 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		1. we're on a tech forum and can quickly link to other discussions on the company. Many employees may not even be aware there was a change in management. If they were, their statement outright lied to them saying they still wanted to continue to grow. Meanwhile, many Vimeo clients won't know about this for months or even years. So no, not everyone knew. 2. And I'm saying a cooperation shouldn't be able to make reckless decisions like "lets lay off most of our workforce" withotu reprecussions. Like most civilized societies outside the US do. Thats's what the bulk of my previous response is about. What are you arguing? That you can do anything you want to something you own? That's not true for nearly anything in modern society.

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_DeadFred_ 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the Reagan loving greed of the 1980s this was considered vile, movies were made and the people that did it excluded from polite company.