this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Valve able to do that because they are private company, the exponential growth is only made mandatory because of the stakeholder. if the growth is stagnant(even with healthy profit), it's very unattractive to investor, hence growth is needed to keep the cog running.
I wonder, what actual benefits are there in publicly traded companies for society as whole? Benefits that are good for you, me and everyone else equally.
It's mostly the effect of expanding the company, like more job, better product, etc etc. sometime it help develop the society quicker because they get more capital to do bigger thing and put in research to do better thing or find new thing, but in return you have to promise growth and return to people giving you money to do that thing. i don't think it's meant to be altruistic cus it's not charity.
A bit like the difference between building bigger and unstable houses vs smaller and stable. No idea where you got the charity concept from, i dont think anyone has even mentioned it before.
Charity as in the purpose is purely for the good of society. Unless it's rhetorical, I merely answer your question.
Sorry, when word "charity" gets mentioned in this context tends to annoy me a lot as sentence "we are not a charity" seems to be like magic word to some that can be used to excuse any shitty behaviour by the company.
I haven't seen a better product from companies that grow big. I always see the quality go down and users stay because of lock-in.
Gets you something to add to your 401k portfolio. Which I don't think is a great argument; there are plenty of other ways to handle retirement even in a fundamentally capitalist system.
There's a theory out there that as SP500 indices for 401k's become the dominant investment, that will convince publicly traded companies to think long term. Those indices don't jump in and out of stocks. They want to add a stock and then keep it for decades. Companies would change their thinking to match.
I'm not convinced of that, though. Starting with the fact that 401k's started as a tax loophole that got mistaken for a good retirement plan, while traditional pensions and Social Security have been eroded away (to say the least). But it's a possible outcome.
I think the initial idea of like "I have a great idea but don't have the capital to get it off of the ground" is a decent argument for public companies, or in the case where employees are shareholders and thus reap reward when companies are successful, but I think these are both mostly antiquated notions and the ills of how public companies are today are a net-loss, and there are generally better ways to accomplish both of these things.
Especially in tech, it's entirely common to charge nothing, make no money and burn investment money until they end up either so dominant they essentially have monopoly power (think: Amazon) or that the business plan is reach critical mass and hopefully sell. And then the very notion that every business has to grow forever leads to rather perverse incentives. Again, especially if you look at tech, basically all of the FAANG companies used to be a lot better/nicer until some critical mass is hit and then they have to enshittify everything.