Well, you've gotten to the crux of it. Stop trusting culture to for profit companies who will be flipped as soon as majority stakeholders get a whiff of "cash me out." Brewster Kahle takes the role of the Internet Archive and its mission very seriously. It has been organized in a manner to defend against this peril and will survive a custodian transition.
“The Internet Archive…is building a home for Universal Access to All Knowledge, open to everyone, everywhere, to use as they like. Open to all societies of the future that care to build on our triumphs and learn from our mistakes.” -- Lawrence Lessig, narrator
EDIT: TLDR Build public goods if motivated and resourced, defend them through legal, logical, physical, and technological controls.
Exactly. And there's tons of stuff out there it doesn't have, waiting to be converted from analog media or out of the clutches of overreaching copyright.
I think the message is more about self-organizing and takings steps to be active in preservation. The Internet Archive does great work, but putting all our eggs in that basket creates a huge risk if it becomes a Library of Alexandria, and publishers would love for it to no longer exist. [0]
Internet Archive can never exist in the EU in regards to hosting because they're so egregiously violating basic consumer rights, including the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten. They make it intentionally difficult, and often impossible, to get content removed from their archive (especially if you don't control the domain). They're oblivious to how many violations of personal information they contain within their own archives - by design grabbing content without having any idea what it is - and stand no chance of ever meeting stringent EU laws on such matters including GDPR.
And that's something to celebrate? No, it's something HN nearly universally somehow overlooks in every single conversation about Internet Archive, because they get a pass (the end justifies the means essentially).
Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.
The 'right to be forgotten' has always been one of the more ill-conceived ideas coming from the EU. Censoring lawful and factual information is dubious in principle and flawed as a means of protecting privacy. Since its introduction, it has been widely abused as a tool to hide misdeeds and embarrassments, to pretend they never actually happened.
> Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.
You raise some interesting points, but the kill-it-with-fire solution ignores the great (necessary!) benefits the archive provides to humanity, by protecting useful public/published information from constant churn.
Humanity is just beginning to find its moral/ethical way forward, in this new integrated world of information, by feel in the dark.
In the meantime, its unavoidable that many things will be imperfect balances, and people will disagree where the balances should be.
European laws are not universal laws. This is like arguing that European corporations violate human rights by not enforcing the 2nd amendment. Which the US considers to be an unalienable right. That would be absurd, just like trying to claim that some particular right you have in Europe is suddenly universal and a "human right".
I'm glad that organizations don't try to cater to every single law in every country. But it's weird that this urge to force their own laws on the entire world seems so prevalent amongst Europeans.
Because the right to be forgotten is idiotic. Humanity has a right to accurate history even if it's embarrassing to certain individuals. Information archiving is a matter of preservation and continuity of understanding that can live for millennia if we do it right.
British Library archives every publication, print and digital (including websites and social media posts), made in UK. They started to do this before exiting EU.
They don't just do it, but are obligated to do it.
> violating basic consumer rights, including the right to privacy
It's an openly published stuff that was openly available at some point and didn't require any credentials like login and password for access.
It's like pinning a piece of paper on a public lamppost and then complaining that someone wrote the text down and told others.
> and the right to be forgotten
By the way, did you forget about Herostratus already or should I remind you that you must bear no memory of this arsonist who burned Temple of Artemis?
> They make it intentionally difficult, and often impossible, to get content removed from their archive.
I did read about people sending GDPR requests and getting their personal data removed. I suspect that using just "I want this deleted" as a reasoning will result in rejection though.
British Library that operated in EU requires a legal reason for material removal, not just "I don't want this here".
> (especially if you don't control the domain)
It's reasonable to prove the right to manage the data first.
> Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.
Publishing stuff openly makes it available to everyone. 100% of people. Why do it and then be mad that someone remembered it?
I will rephrase one of the most widely used quotes in American movies: "You have a right to remain silent. Everything you post may be remembered".
Internet Archive is great, but to be clear: it's a museum of dead cultures for historical examination and appreciation. That's a valuable service, but it's not at all the same thing as supporting a living community. By its nature, the Internet Archive can never do that.
Why is one supposed to read the first sentence? I am interested in Bandcamp but why would I go past the title of this article since it reads like a dramatic but cryptic facebook post by my retired uncle? There are a LOT of article posted on HN every day, I don't have time to go to every single article and read the first sentence.
It's mostly about Bandcamp but it could indeed be about anything, as later parts of the article mention how MySpace and Twitter are ruined in much the same way.
Did anyone ever actually love Twitter? I can't remember ever getting meaningful value from it. I can't comment on MySpace as it seemed to come and go so quickly (yes, I've been online since before the web, so your dilation may vary).
This one is pretty good tbh. I still think fringe beliefs are tolerated so long as the post isn't inflammatory. That's a pretty hard thing to sustain. I think the mods put the right touch on it.
I consider it a message board more than a social network, it has no focus on social links between members and nothing fancy that web2.0 era introduced (ajax and such)
When Facebook started I sure loved it. For a college kid it was such great way to keep in touch with all the friends you made that transferred schools (or that you met abroad), share pictures, plan events, and give people a quick snapshot of your personality. It really felt like a magical use of the internet that refined myspace in to a useful tool.
When I saw a photo on Twitter of that plane that had just landed in the Hudson, posted by somebody who had evacuated the plane, I knew something dramatically new had arrived. I later saw that I could search news events and see opinions and perspectives that I'd never heard of in my life. Everybody was in the same room, we could tap into the zeitgeist.
Eventually it just caused my blood pressure to rise and I eventually decided to step away. But for a few years, there was something very interesting going on.
I loved Twitter. More than once I've read tweets thinking "this will be on mainstream media in a few days". It felt like the pulse of the world. For any event, I would check Twitter before any news site.
I also had something similar to a community on there for years.
There's no doubt that Twitter used to be the main platform for promotion of solopreneurs and technical content creators.
Twitter used to be quite useful for breaking news stories. A couple of times a year I'd find out about something big currently happening via Reddit, and jump on Twitter to keep track of it as it was developing.
There was always plenty of misinformation, but you'd still find out about the facts an hour or more before it'd be reported on mainstream media. Of course, by the time it hit mainstream media Twitter would pretty much instantly become useless due to all the "thoughts and prayers" retweet pollution, and spammers hijacking the hashtags.
I never joined Twitter, but wasn't there a pretty great statistics Twitter at some point? Dudes like Larry Wasserman, Nate Silver, Hadley Wickham, Andrew Gelman all pretty active and collaborating in the open. I got the impression it had some nice topical communities like that, whereas the frontpage current events feed was pretty much always shit, but that seems like a universal truth of human commons, not something specific to web-based social media or Twitter.
Twitter's story is a bit different. The company was pretty conscientious of its community (as far as giant corporations go) and the magic they had accidentally bottled. It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably, but because a fool offered the owners far more money for it than it was worth, and they quite reasonably took it, and then the new owner immediately ripped it to shreds, apparently unintentionally, yet so effectively that conspiracy theories about it being intentional abound.
i don't see anything being "ripped to shreds". seems mostly the same to me as a casual user. still a toxic place that is still the best for current events. maybe a little more toxic, but it's not like it was great before
The brand value of the word "Twitter" was probably in the billions, and Musk just wiped it away. It was ruined so thoroughly that we can only intelligently talk about it by calling Twitter by its former name because its new name is confusing to even say in conversation.
Twitter's advertising revenue fell off a cliff almost overnight due in no small part to their owner's policy of loudly and publicly attacking individual Twitter advertisers for leaving Twitter.
Twitter had tens of thousands of the most famous celebrities in the world actively participating every day for free, and Musk managed to screw that up in myriad ways, not least of which by falsely labeling them as paid subscribers.
For some godforsaken reason, Twitter's opinion on who and was "notable" or not was a significant status symbol, and Twitter started selling that status symbol for $8/month.
Twitter had a truly impressive internal talent pool, and it's largely gone, ruining their ability to pivot at a time when the whole plan appears to be "wildly pivot."
> It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably
Twitter was nicely profitable in 2018 and 2019[0], then went on an overzealous hiring/spending spree in 2020 and was in not-great financial shape by the time Musk happened. Maybe the previous owners could have turned it around, but we'll never know.
Bandcamp is widely reported to have been profitable since 2012, and it was still steadily growing. Contrary to MySpace and Twitter, its core business is actually selling stuff.
In other words, "Even if you make money, they will ruin your business".
My thesis about the inevitable demise of all good things is that each of us selects the services we love because they had a specific mix of UX and functionality. After 5, 10, maybe 15 years they change so much that they don't look and work anymore the way they did when we discovered them. We would not have picked them in their new shape, so we cry that they have been ruined. The chances that a service improves after our initial selection are slim. The chances that it gets worse are large.
It happened to me with the new UI of K9. I would never installed that app if I saw it in its current UI. I installed it precisely because it's old odd UI suited my needs. Given the U shape of their votes on the Play store I'd say that about half of their users share my point of view. I keep installing the last version before the new UI.
I have long mused that there needs to be a differently structured way to do what bandcamp does (soon, did). Who has experiences with those structures that can still deliver technically? Co-ops? Values-first companies like iFixit? Non-profits?
I think Co-ops are the way to go, because if your employees and your customers are also your owners (shareholders) then doing what's right for the customer is by definition what's best for shareholders.
Co-ops are a very flexible and successful business structure. For example, people in the northeastern US probably know of Cabot Cheddar. This is part of the Agri-Mark co-op, which does something like $1 billion in annual business and employs about 1,000 people.
Agri-Mark is a "producer co-op," which means that it's owned by dairy farms. There are also very successful "consumer co-ops," as well as "worker co-ops."
There are many nice things about co-ops:
- They can be economically competitive.
- They're democratically run. (Larger ones often elect a board and/or appoint management.)
- They're strictly voluntary associations.
There are also reasons why you don't see more co-operatives:
- They don't have huge incentives to scale. There are plenty of amazing grocery co-ops, for example, that have one or two excellent stores but no desire to expand.
- They raise capital through their members. Details vary, but they tend to scale more like bootstrapped businesses than startups.
But a musicians' producer co-op could absolutely build something like Bandcamp. It would be a lot of work, and it would require some genuine organizational talent.
A lot of the big open source foundations (the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc) are essentially producer co-ops for open source software, even if that's not what the paperwork says.
I think we should absolutely build more co-ops, for things that really matter.
> At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage.
> These comparatively low wages can make it very difficult to recruit managers from investor-owned firms.
Wow, actually brilliant idea to keep out the nasty investor-owned firms away!
Ah, I couldn't figure out why it sounded vaguely familiar until I saw the "Works of Kim Stanley Robinson" section at the bottom of the page:
> The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is also portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement [52] and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation[53] two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars.
Red Mars was one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read, but Green Mars starts pretty slow so I didn't get very far into it. I think I'll start the trilogy over.
Of course anybody can start a co-op and nobody will object. It won't be controversial. It won't generate fierce online debates. Everyone will wish them well and that will be that.
What's contentious about unionization is that the unionizers want to take over an existing organization that's already survived and become profitable. That's a lot easier to do than it is to build a company with that (or any other) structure. (And it's going to be contentious no matter how it's organized.)
i mean that's what class warfare is right? owners exploit workers, workers fight back. profit comes from the extra value workers generate but are not paid for.
Obviously I reject the framing. I have never felt exploited by my employers, nor do I feel entitled to a share of the profits beyond what I negotiated when I took the job.
You may not have felt it, but profit comes from the value you generate beyond what you are paid. That's exploitation, and it is an objective reality. You may not have abused, which is different and tends to get people more immediately angry.
Edit: You may not feel entitled to earn what you make, but others might just call that loser talk and no capitalist would ever say that.
You’re describing the labor theory of value, which you present as undeniable fact, but which of course is the subject of one of the most salient and contentious debates of the last century.
Except, the return on capital input is what generates the profit. Labour extracts the entire return on labour input for itself.
Of course it does. Why would labour settle for anything less than every last cent (within some reasonable margin of error) of value that it produces? Labour is highly mobile and holds all the power. Labour is able to produce value even without capital. Capital, on the other hand, doesn't function without labour. You are simply not going to keep labour around to maintain capital operation if you don't give back all the labour value it produces.
In practice, we can also demonstrate that this is the case as even when unions roll into town – which really reenforces how much power labour wields – you never see the needle move more than small percentages that are within the margin of error. A $10 per hour job might be able to push for $11 per hour, but never does a $10 per hour job suddenly jump to a $100 per hour job.
To exploit means to reap some benefit. If there's no profit, there's no exploitation, I guess. A profitable business is absolutely exploiting its workers, that's what exploit means.
> but profit comes from the value you generate beyond what you are paid.
Maybe centuries ago that was true. In the modern economy, workers are already extracting the full amount of value they generate[1]. Profit for a business comes from the additional value its capital is able to generate on top of the labour value.
[1] Within reason. The market is never perfectly efficient. Sometimes workers see slightly less – sometimes slightly more – but not anything hugely out of line.
Automation. Pay for materials to be delivered to a factory, automated processes deliver it, factory makes X and packages it, automation delivers to your door.
Not all the way there, but surprisingly close.
Let's face it: labor is soon to be obsolete. All economic models that include labor will become antique notions, similar to factoring in horsepower.
Gonna be a rough road: all folks in power can think of is, how to keep workers slaving away at something, anything, so long as they don't revolt.
The US is a consumer paradise service economy because capitalists shifted manufacturing outside of the US. It's still happening all over the world. We are sitting in the imperial core and our lifestyle is a non-replicable model that is struggling to service 4% of the world, maybe more if you include Europe.
People in the US have consumer items, pointless dictatorial jobs, and insane stress from having the welfare state stripped for parts by venture capitalists. We aren't even enjoying what we have even though materially, a good fraction of the population have more than so many others. If you lose your pointless job, you lose your home, healthcare, and transportation and are considered a surplus person.
Value produced is a function of multiple inputs. One of those inputs might be called "labor". Another one of those inputs might be called "capital". Perhaps there are also other inputs, but I don't want to address them in this comment. We can speak of, "if the amount of labor is increased by some marginal amount, what is the marginal increase in the value produced". We can also speak of "if the amount of capital is increased by some marginal amount, what is the marginal increase in the value produced".
If we fix some baseline combination of quantities of "labor" and "capital", and compare it to some later combination where both have been increased, there are a number of possible differences to take.
There are V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc).
One could call V(l_0 + dl, c_0) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional labor", and V(l_0, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital",
or one might call V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(L_0, c_0 + dc) "the contribution from additional labor" and V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0 + dl, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital".
In a linear approximation, these two ways of assigning quantities to these names for quantities, could be the same. But I wouldn't really expect them to be the same in practice, at least for large values of dl and dc. (note: I am using "dl" and "dc" instead of \Delta l and \Delta c, because it is more convenient to type. I don't mean to suggest that the changes are extremely small or infinitesimal, as might be suggested by using the letter d instead of \Delta.)
As such, I think that "the additional value that an additional amount of capital is able to produce" is a meaningful value if "quantity of labor" is held constant, and that "the additional value that an additional amount of labor is about to produce" is a meaningful value if "amount of capital" is held constant.
When both values are changed, then how much to attribute the increase in value produced to, is I think inherently somewhat ambiguous, but also not a completely meaningless question.
Given the four values V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc), assuming that all four of the differences I mentioned previously are non-negative, then clearly the additional value from either cannot reasonably be said to be more than V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0).
Nor, I think, can the value attributed to the change along one axis, be reasonably estimated as less than the minimum of the differences along that axis.
Also, I think probably a more reasonable upper bound on either contribution, is the maximum of the two differences for the respective axis.
Now, maybe your goal is to talk about the deserts, rather than causes? But if we are talking about what things are causally responsible for how much of something is produced, I think it's pretty clear that this analysis in terms of differences of these 4 terms, is on the right track.
When you use capital to buy machines, they are embodied labor from outside of the organization and the exploitation is shifted from internal to external.
The core claim is that simply buying things and managing things produces value all on its own and it's transparently false as if the thing wasn't produced, you couldn't buy it.
The other core claim is that there's a legitimacy to the idea that if you buy something that is socially useful, you get to derive the exclusive right to the fruits of it which makes no sense.
I guess it comes down to your definition of "exploitation", whether that's bad, and whether you consider employment to be a mutually exploitative arrangement (which I could get behind, though I think it's not a bad thing).
If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.
The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.
I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.
I think a problem with what you said is that you are evaluating how much someone can earn in comparison to a race to the bottom with other workers. The proper comparison is how much money the business is making as a whole.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US GDP is ~20T, if everyone made an equal amount before taxes, that would be somewhere around 120k (a little more or less as workers are about half the economy).
You can see from that comparison that the level of exploitation is far higher than than you supposed.
In general, there is usually a power imbalance which prevents most prospective employees from negotiating effectively for their compensation. You don’t feel that power imbalance. Good for you! But, you don’t seem to recognize that anyone else’s lived experience might be different than your own.
That doesn't even make sense. This sounds like your language compiler must implement a bunch of optimizations mine doesn't.
Unions seek to organize the affairs and interests of a unit of labor to extract a fair share of productivity for the people actually doing the work. The alternative is all that value gets captured by C-suite or investors, with decreased mobility of the people doing the work into the class of investors.
Unions also have a side effect of creating a selection pressure against exploitation of your workforce to attain profitability. Without the unions spooking the management drones, you get things like Walmart and McD's going and outsourcing what was previously done via payroll to State benefit programs.
What you’re sensing is that we’re very far apart on this issue, even down to some core assumptions. For example, an organization is not obligated to pay any particular individual an amount that you deem to be satisfactory to obviate the need for state welfare benefits, the mention of which in this context is a non sequitur.
>For example, an organization is not obligated to pay any particular individual an amount...
With you thusfar. Business is generally something engaged in by two individuals consisting of an exchange of value in good faith projected to leave both parties coming out ahead.
>that you deem to be satisfactory to obviate the need for state welfare benefits...
Specifically severed this to illustrate how little it takes to go from uncontroversial to "what are you on?" As an employer in the United States there is an implicit assumption you are engaging in business in good faith. This was part of the reason things like minimum wages ended up being a "Gentleman's Agreement" like affair. If you couldn't even keep up with Federal minimum wage, that reflected poorly on you as a business operator.
>the mention of which in this context is a non sequitur.
The mention thereof is far from a non-sequitur. Given that there is no dearth of evidence that the fact that places like Walmart and McD's have worker populations disproportionately represented in State Benefit's programs, up to and including HR supplied documentation on how to on ramp to said programs; that a preponderance of the evidence at least suggests at some level this is reflected in some aspect in the grand corporate calculus of "How do I get the most for the least?" When it becomes a part of your Corporate Strategy, we have issues.
Outsourcing your workers living expenses to the American taxpayer is not acceptable.
Deliberately paying people a wage so low, then handing them a "how-to" guide for food stamps is deliberately tilting your extraction of labor far more in your favor than the worker's, because you're turning around and telling the worker "Don't forget to file for <insert welfare program here> this month in your off time!" After all, I'm sure employees were not encouraged to engage in this activity on the clock.
So you're absolutely right. I come from different priors. You should have your shit straight enough as an employer to keep your employees contributing to, instead of being doled out to from, the tax rolls.
If you cannot do this, you should be strongly disincentivized from doing up to and including paying extra corporate tax to recover the costs of the people you're stiffing.
Back to the original topic at hand. How does a Union try to "take over" a company? A Union can't by definition, because at that point, the company would be a co-op. The Union is fundamentally limited to acting as an extraction to divert value delegation in the counter management/investor direction. The Union still has no implicit control outside of "you do what you want, but this group of laborers is not playing ball unless..." and channeling it down through a handful of savvy, experienced, and one can only hope, good faith represeentatives.
In no way shape or form does that line up with your contention that a union "takes over" which with it suggests taking possession of the assets and investments that make up the company.
> Without the unions spooking the management drones, you get things like Walmart and McD's going and outsourcing what was previously done via payroll to State benefit programs.
Part of the blame there lies with the government allowing corporations to offload their labor costs onto it. That's one of many ways in which the government gives handouts to corporations which is the literal antithesis of the market economy.
Certainly they have less incentive than traditional corporations, but that is the point - they can elect not to grow if it best serves their other goals, which is very difficult for investor-owned companies.
eh, going to be completely contrarian. Bandcamp appears to have been making almost no money / very little net profit. That's fine, as long as the owner is ok running it that way.
The users of bandcamp -- both artists and fans -- will likely be on far more stable ground if bandcamp earns a reasonable profit. If the owners view it as an asset instead of a charity endeavor or a labor of love. Because in the latter case, people eventually want to move on, as the original creator did after 15 years.
> Bandcamp appears to have been making almost no money / very little net profit. That's fine, as long as the owner is ok running it that way.
That literally is fine. There was never a need to turn it into a highly profitable service. If it was paying bills and salaries, it was an absolute success.
Which sounds to me like an unfortunate betrayal of the company for personal profit. But I don't know all the details.
I'd be surprised if the employees were in it for the guiding mission of "build an artist-centric and fan-centric platform, putting middleman profits after great experiences, until the day I get tired and cash out."
It seems doubtful whether any employee genuinely excluded the possibility of the owner eventually leaving when they signed up. It's not some rare or obscure edge case.
It was a company founded with a purpose and recent actions threaten that purpose - that's easily characterized as a betrayal.
Either way, there's no slippery slope here. I do believe already that most business owners are acting immorally in the pursuit of personal gain. I don't believe "wanting to get richer than other people" is actually a defensible motivation for actions that either worsen the experience of other people or prevent others from getting a share of that wealth.
edit: the content of the comment I'm replying to completely changed while I was writing my reply, but I'm just going to leave this here.
> It seems doubtful whether any employee genuinely excluded the possibility of the owner eventually leaving when they signed up. It's not some rare or obscure edge case.
Of course they know it's a possibility, but surely most hoped the temptation would be resisted. Again, the whole point of the platform was to focus on artists first, and fans second, and growth somewhere behind that. But all that is only talk without contractual obligations, and so we see the company sold out and gutted because they can.
Yes, I was writing a two part comment, the first part a longer point about slippery slopes but then I realized it wouldn't necessarily develop into one, so I deleted it. I'm surprised it got published though, it couldn't have been more than a few seconds between button clicks.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the last paragraph though.
The employees themselves signed up, received compensation, and then spent that, partly, on self-interested things, without exception as far as I know.
So it would be pretty odd for them to hope that the owner wouldn't also have some self-interest.
> So it would be pretty odd for them to hope that the owner wouldn't also have some self-interest.
They expected the owner to get paid a salary, yes. They did not expect the owner to go trade the entire mission of the company for a huge payday. These are different things.
The owner sold the company to Epic, which did keep the company's mission the same for a year afterwards, it's then Epic which made this recent decision.
If musicians just want shopify but for music, you can cut all the editorial and just be a store backend. So yes, I bet they can. Which is what the new owners seem to have done.
I would love to hear from people who worked at Bandcamp during the sale to Epic. Even at that moment I seriously feared for what was once one of my favorite media services ever. Even if Epic seemed like they wanted to be hands-off, I can't imagine working at Bandcamp and being excited to be owned by a company like Epic - not necessarily "evil", but clearly not aligned with Bandcamp's founding ethos.
I struggle to think of any institutions the VC/tech/internet era has produced with any long-term value. My assumption is that these companies go through a cyclical pattern of providing value and then destroying it once successful. That timescale also seems to be getting shorter.
The money can provide incentive for entrepreneurs to create real or perceived value in hopes of being acquired for large sums. That just feeds into the trend, unfortunately.
You struggle to see why any company who has been founded in the last 20 years isn't providing long term value.
1) Obviously, first and foremost, this is a tautology.
2) There is little proof that companies that last long term, do so for good reasons
3) What does it matter... at all? Wide and short, Long and narrow, short and sweet, all these forms of impact have nothing to do with their inherent value
They've been around a bit longer than 20 years, but Valve comes to mind as a company that completely changed PC gaming in a fairly sustainable long-term way, likely because they're not beholden to VCs or external shareholders. This matters because they've built up immense trust that the games bought 10, 15, 20 years ago will still be there today, with minimal BS. This made people feel OK buying digital-only games. I don't think we'd have all these online delivery game stores these days if Valve had jerked people around to maximize short-term earnings.
You're so right. You're the only one who is allowed to define what is a "real" problem. Every widely popular thing that you dislike is just virtual opiates, after all.
There are very strong arguments to be made that video games are an extravagant waste of time and resources. There are some decent arguments to be made in their favor[0]. This isn't a question of personal preference. I personally like video games, but we're all allowed to attempt to define what is a "real" problem. That is the prerogative of citizens in a free society.
> Classic HN comment.
Try to be more constructive in the future.
0. "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" McGonigal, Jane
And tying back into the article and the former parent company involved with Bandcamp, that's precisely why The Epic Games Store has failed so quickly. Epic changes policies to get the most explosive expansion whenever possible, only for things to collapse because the actual users are the support structure. Epic forces exclusives, Epic very heavily try to stop games from storing data locally, Epic can revoke your purchase at any point, Epic can ban you from EGS and thus all access to your games thanks to their DRM, and Epic has no rules other than "no porn" leading to a flood of shovelware, asset flips, and NFT/crypto scams.
And the thing is, Epic are following industry norms for this. All digital storefronts are trying to enforce the same sorts of policies. Get as much "stuff" in front of as many people as possible and have them fork over money to rent that "stuff" with tenuous if any protections for their purchase. Valve really are the outliers in this, and the only others I can think of that do what they do are Itch.io and Bandcamp, one a tiny player catering to a lower market and the other essentially the only survivor in their particular niche. Gamejolt and Soundcloud aren't even really competitors for each of them respectively.
Sorry, but what on earth does any of this actually mean?
You appear to be arguing in unequivocal favor of a short-termist, purely profit-driven way of doing business, which is a viewpoint that, to me, needs a whole lot more cogent support than the word salad posted above.
As a user I care about stability, which requires things to work out on longer time scales than a few years. And since I cannot know or verify if a company also cares about this (and will still care in a few years), I have to trust them. But such trust is hard to come by...
I try not to comment on stuff like this but I'm going to make a one-time exception.
Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media (Reddit's default subs, Twitter's political echo chambers). My life is way, way better now than it was prior to the internet, Google and half a dozen other services.
Even HN's favourite boogieman Facebook provided me with insane value. For example:
- While I lived abroad, it provided an easy, passive way for me to keep in touch with my family. Compare that to my parents' desperate 10 dollars per minute phone calls in the 1980s
- I met friends through Facebook advertising for a boardgaming group (that I also ran on Facebook.) I met people from way, way more backgrounds than otherwise possible
- I can passively keep in touch with friends and easily get in touch if I'm in the same area.
People "struggle" to find "long term value" because that's ironically the meta for upvotes on the contrarian SV Internet right now and we internalize those values far too easily. Rest assured, value exists for most, if not all.
Without commercial spam (which I don't think can be blamed on VCs) it is possible all this would be readily doable through things like email, newsgroups, IRC, XMPP. Inauthentic users/coordinated interests beyond commercial spam would also have been an eventual problem to overcome.
This is like the infamous dropbox comment [1], only instead of you making it as a prediction, you made it over a decade after the company became wildly successful.
You think without Facebook the choice would be $10/min long distance calls and that email wouldn't be an option? I can agree the big use case of Facebook probably accelerated internet access but I don't think it would be that severe.
That long term value you mentioned has little to do with Facebook itself though. In my teens I met friends through IRC and AOL, people across the world and passively kept in touch with them through the eras of IRC, Skype and now Discord.
But what you don't see (or perhaps didn't pay attention to) is the way that Facebook monopolizes that value. They gained that control through ruthless manipulation, advertisement, buying of competitors and more. Then once you have buy-in, you're stuck with the enshittification they force on you because all of the alternatives have died.
For Bandcamp, they existed in the bought competitors space. And we're seeing the cycle I mentioned above occur faster and faster. The goal of companies like Facebook, Epic, Uber etc isn't to actually make a good thing. It's to dominate a market. The value is incidental, occasionally coming with the aquisitions.
Aside from the corrosive individual/personal effects of social media and the cumulative effort by parents/communities to mitigate, I would agree, net net. (Gen-Xer, as well.)
Small towns are no longer truly isolating. If you're an outsider, for whatever reason, in a small town it's no longer a sentence for loneliness, harassment and abuse. You will likely still experience harassment and abuse, but there is bound to be a community online that you can connect to in order to overcome loneliness.
The flipside is that people who were better suited for life in a small town have lost what the others have gained. Life moves fast everywhere now, your friends and family may step into your life at any moment of the day without notice, even though you live thousands of miles away. All of the big city hustle and bustle reaches out and touches people through their phones and stopping it requires people to deliberately and overtly snub people they'd prefer not to overtly snub.
I've been alive way before facebook and I can think of a number of ways they have made my life worse, not better. It's up to personal preference whether the trade-off is worth it, but to argue that facebook is a boogieman of ignorant people is really lame.
> Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media
That's a pretty bad selection bias. You shouldn't exclude the perspectives of those who've been harmed by social media. That would be like asking people if alcohol has been a positive influence in their life, but excluding alcoholics.
I'd be interested in large scale analysis of this part of society. IMO, VC are mostly feeling trends and exploiting the coming wave until it's absurd, then find the next wave to exploit. There are even philosophical arguments in favor of this.
It's what a lot of web3 believers are trying to build, but it's very hard to both profit and give up control, resulting in a lot of people pretending to do web3 but really it's just web2 with some web3 window-dressing. But, people will keep trying, and maybe they will get it right one day. The dollars right now aren't flowing into web3 though so it may be a while.
The problem is that the technology enables illicit activity on a large scale because of its core premises.
The problem is NOT that people write it off because of the risks built-in to the technology, at least for most people. I'm sure scammers and crypto zealots do consider that a problem.
The timescale has shortened because interest rate policies have drastically changed, and suddenly the 'value' of a company carrying debt in the name of growth has changed, in addition to possibly creating a need to generate additional revenue just to service existing debt that must be refinanced at a higher rate.
I have found some long-term value in Hacker News[0], an internet forum for technology-related discussions sponsored by startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Google Search? You might think it's getting worse but nobody is accessing the internet with raw URLs any more. Everyone uses search.
You can also say what you want about FB/Instragram doing many bad things but you can still be "friends" with people you know and stay up-to-date with them in a pub/sub style (which didn't really exist outside of christmas cards before social media was thing).
Google/Apple Maps are a great resource still.
Apple produced and still produces smartphones which have massively changed society. Those aren't going anywhere
Smartphones enabled app-based services for banks and other institutions and such with a ubiquity that did not exist in the desktop and dialup era.
Like it's so easy to look at how the world has changed in the last 15 years that I have trouble taking your claims that nothing lasts seriously.
Wikipedia is the biggest thing that comes to mind for me.
However, I think that falls pretty squarely in the "internet" era rather than the "VC" era of your point. I'm not sure if that gets at the spirit of your argument (which I generally agree with).
No, I don't believe it is. I think it's part of the WikiMedia foundation, which itself is a non-profit. Could be wrong on that.
I interpreted the word "institutions" pretty broadly here though, since the original comment was talking about a whole "era". Not trying to disagree with the gist of the original comment, just making discussion about an edge case I thought of.
That's my point. Non-profits like WP or even benevolent dictatorships like Valve seem immune to this. It's once you get a pure-profit incentive through VC funding or public trading that you get this kind of "we can't have nice things" where public goodwill gets pillaged into money.
I would reframe this and ask, are any institutions providing increasing value or even stable value over time. Plenty of institutions provide long-term value, but the value reaches a peak and then declines. Netflix, Google, SO, etc. provide value to me, but not as much as before.
> The companies that buy up sites like Bandcamp are interested in nothing except ensuring the executives’ pockets get lined appropriately
I like how it presents things as if Bandcamp's original management had no part in selling.
This is not China. They were not forced to sell. They were the ones who had to decide whether to do it or not, but somehow they are not to blame for any consequences.
I think this gets exacerbated with the "we're a family!" culture of employee in-groups. Feeling like a company is your home amplifies the disappointment and feeling of betrayal when the CEO decides to sell.
Communities that form around a website or service are living things - they need nourishment to thrive, and can certainly be killed. The only sustainable way forward is to form artist-driven, bottom-up, non-profit organizations to nurture communities like BandCamp.
The rule is: every for-profit company will lose its way in the drive for higher and higher profits, or it'll be killed for having not kept that promise. It's inevitable. Every company in existence now will die one day.
There's no guarantee a democratic organization would last forever, but at least its not subject to the artificial drive to grow forever.
There is a premise that the myopic optimizations beloved by economists and MBA's eventually paint companies into a corner and then they die.
Sort of the classic way naive lost hiker in the mountains will walk downhill with it getting steeper and steeper till they slip and fall to their death. In the case of a companies they run on thinner and thinner margins until some event drives them negative.
> The only sustainable way forward is to form artist-driven, bottom-up, non-profit organizations to nurture communities like BandCamp.
It will only work if there is laser-like focus on the primary organizational objective: letting artists make a living.
Falling of a cliff when blindly chasing growth is just one problem. In the current era, the probability that they will get involved in policing the politics of their members and issue statements on everything from the state of rain forests to Palestine is close to 1.0. The organization will thus be torn apart by internal rivalries.
Businesses always need to grow in order to deal with ever-increasing costs of running the business. (Rent hardly ever goes down, salaries hardly every go down, costs of services hardly every go down, etc etc.) There are only so many ways one can cut the cost of running a business, and most of them mean not keeping the status quo for employees and making it worse for them.
At the end of the day, Bandcamp's founders sold to Epic. We all knew that was going to have a bad ending, we just didn't know the details. Now we know the details.
I mean, sure, "they" being "capitalist overlords", created a world where the Bandcamp founders would need to sell out in order to have am assured secure life for themselves and offspring. But they did sell out. Epic is just doing what Epic does.
It seems odd—Bandcamp was basically a small company that could have chugged along with small but non-zero profits indefinitely.
Epic did nothing with them, and now they are being sold to a company that will almost certainly just destroy their value.
Why? This is dumb. I can see why Bandcamp’s owners would sell, but no rational buyer would buy Bandcamp, it is a company that is only valuable because of the goodwill that it has. Their niche is very-online music enthusiasts who are into the community feeling. We’re going to notice and leave as soon as the cash-in change happens.
Why didn’t Epic and this other company whoever they are just light some little piles of money on fire instead. At least they could have warmed their feet.
The narrative for why Epic did it is believed to be that it was an arrow in the "Apple is a monopoly" quiver. Epic would build a music-buying iOS App, and then complain to the government that Apple demands 30% of the revenue.
> a world where the Bandcamp founders would need to sell out in order to have am assured secure life for themselves and offspring.
"need" is a bit twisted, i'm not sure anyone "needs" a million or so. If they really wanted to get out of it and keep it nice they most likely could have set up a non-profit or something, raised some money from the community and probably still get a small rent in some way. Also it's not like the CEO of such a company (smallish but still) is strapped on cash already.
> But they did sell out.
That's it.. There's no excuse and as you said, everyone knew this kind of constant downhill had a very high probability to happen. They definitely took the 90% chance coin-flip to hose the community and get "an actual bit of capital" much of money.
I think the lesson is that successful companies (and other organizations, and bands) are often temporary and you should enjoy it while it lasts. Don’t let a sad ending ruin the good memories.
I think the lesson is that we have a system in place which incentives this categorically and there's no escape hatch from it. What systems could be developed which would counter or de-incentivize this from occurring?
Be careful. Any system that stops behavior that you don't want might also stop the thing that you are trying to help from being created in the first place
Right, there's one way to verify this, using the scientific method and empirical observations. There's also one clear way of guaranteed failing: giving up before even starting.
There is no simple rule that tells you what's worth preserving and what can be thrown out. There are incentives to not break things that are working as long as they make money.
But incentives only go so far. There was little incentive for Musk to do what he's doing at Twitter, but he did it anyway after he got caught in a trap of his own devising.
If you want to solve the problem of not relying on a company with your sales then you need to either setup the online store yourself.
The problem is that people want the experience to be frictionless and that is best achieved by a corporation. Maybe someone could clone Bandcamp feature list but payment processing will be a hassle .
Regardless artists make more on merch and doing shows than streaming . I see many artists investing in merch sales (and I will buy that) and or “collector edition” products.
Is it capitalism ? Sure. Can it be truly solved . Not really. People don’t want to be bothered to make their own websites with a shop and do everything themselves. Open source will get you 90% there but honestly just doing shows and selling it in person is profitable and giving away the music online or stream using twitch .
> Maybe someone could clone Bandcamp feature list but payment processing will be a hassle .
Why is payment processing considered a hassle? Set up a Paypal account, create a link and have customers pay through that. Done.
Payment processors are in the business of making it easy to pay people. Use any of the myriad of payment processors to get money from people.
Is it slightly less frictionless than standing up a half-million dollar website with options to pay via CatCoin? Yes, but is it really worth it to optimize for 1% of customers who can't be arsed to pay with anything other than their favorite, obscure method of payment?
"Payment processors are in the business of making it easy to pay people."
The most important role is to prevent fraud and keep reputation high. Making it easier to pay is way down the list or using a US credit card from Laos location wouldn't trigger alarms and prevent the transaction requiring a manual override
> Beloved websites are destroyed by money hungry ghouls everyday.
Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built
The problem is money, it pits people against each other. It draws in all of these sociopathic businesspeople. It turns people into ass kissers. It liquidates trust. It destroys community
Build a culture where people think money = God and this is what happens. It consistently brings out the absolute worst in people
>Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built
So do the people who let the business people in just get to dodge the blame? "Oh well, we can't expect anyone to have principles in the face of so much money, so we shouldn't hold anyone to a standard?"
i kept waiting for the punchline in the paragraph comparing BandCamp to MySpace but it never came.
"Bandcamp and MySpace were both built by people who genuinely love music."
MySpace was sold by "Tom" to a large company which then, eventually, abandoned it... just like what is likely to happen to BandCamp. Tom made out like a bandit.. just like the owner of BandCamp likely did.
MySpace as a major hub for musicians was probably an accident - originally it was just a clone of friendster, a social media site that was notorious for going offline.
Too bad too, because back in the aughts (even after the News Corp acquisition) bands still relied on it for an internet presence, advertising shows, etc.
This article asks a good question. What is the point of capitalism? If these acquisitions exist simply to make the line go up, why? Bandcamp will NOT be better off under this new rule, we will all be worse off as listeners of music. Why allow this at all?
It would be good to get some background on the original owner(s) and why they sold. Was it retirement? Was it move to the next thing? unknown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp
Ethan Diamond says they sold to "provide the resources to bring a lot more benefit to the artists, labels, and fans who use the site"
like vinal pressing .."Epic ticked all of the boxes"
He sold for money. He planned on continue to lead the team (CEO). So he was part of the plan to fire everyone before Epic sold to this new company
I have been praising Bandcamp for years. How it's a great site, how I love buying music there instead of streaming.
But what I never did? Read their blog or used any of their social features. So as long as Songtrader keeps paying artists, and keeps offering downloads while letting me stream the music for free until I can decide if I want to buy it or not, I'll be fine with them.
I wanted to highlight what actually is worthwhile about BC for what I assume are still quite a few people. But you are right, your comment really improved the discussion.
It actually echoes my feelings as both a musician and consumer. Just give me the music, I'll find it on my own through other channels.
To put it another way, there are plenty of ways to find music, what underground musicians need is a an easy to use tool to put their music online, as we are not big enough for Spotify.
It's more realistic than smug. I run a small net-label on bandcamp and don't really care about the culture of Bandcamp outside of it being a platform we can easily slap albums on and share through other channels. I just need the site to work and exist while passing us our percentage for any sales that come through.
Bandcamp has lasted because they haven't let the place go to shit like their competition and they've been reliable enough to stay online consistently.
I don't need social tie ins, and I don't want to message my listener base about anything. The spam emails I get from labels trying to be social go directly into the trash and usually make me unfollow them (or disable notifications)
I didn't say the article is moot. What I wanted to offer was a counterpoint because in the last few days ago I've been reading is how they are killing everything that made BC BC. And it's simply not like that for all of us.
Your comment is also bog standard every time there's a service or something being cut down. Like the same with Twitter when they removed headlines, I saw people saying 'well I never read headlines in the first place so it didn't matter'.
It's a semi-smug affirmation that you don't care which, great. There's others that do, especially when the trajectory for changes like these is for a platform to get worse, not better.
I'd agree but this article, so the subject of this whole thread, is trying to argue that you should care and that this is important. Isn't it fair for the comments to discuss why they disagree with that?
I agree that it's a pattern that happens a lot on unrelated threads, and it sucks, but this one in particular is an exception since the entire OP is about trying to make us care.
See, you're taking the wrong message from the article entirely, and I suspect so was the OP.
The point of the article isn't to make you care about Bandcamp in particular, though it's clear the author does. It's to point out the fact that if there is something you DO care about, how acquisitions and corporate plays can and will destroy it. You could replace Bandcamp with Steam, or HN or any other entity. That's the point. Not the particulars of Bandcamp itself.
People here get so lost in the weeds and don't actually read what the message of the article is.
Actually yeah on second thoughts you are right. I don't agree with the article at all but I see how the comment you replied to was pretty myopic in this context
I think that journalists (or well, "company-owned content teams") are very quick to overestimate the spirituality and necessity of their work.
They might think that their work is necessary and invaluable, but it doesn't mean that the company or their users will. Like you're saying, I have a hard time caring about Bandcamp losing full-time writers when they weren't the main attraction at all.
The jury is still out on that. Bandcamp's branding effort is hard to measure.
Even if we didn't read their blog posts or listen to their radio podcasts, there is something beautiful in that effort. And I agree that written critique doesn't do much for music or art, for that matter.
Even though you can't quantify it, I wouldn't dismiss Bandcamp branding effort around music.
You can't strip music of everything aside from sounds. Bandcamp's rich illustrations managed to set a musical mood, for example.
Image is important. Controversies, interviews, politics, and even ridiculousness are part of the culture regardless of whether one decides to engage.
Yes. That’s a problem to sort out between the employees and the company, it has nothing do to with users or customers. As a user I’m not going to pretend I know any of the relevant context to engage in activism on behalf of anyone.
The issue has its context, and producing outrage out of thin air to shame a commenter into submission ain't helping you to make any point, really. It's a well-known fallacy which you are invoking
Huh? They are making a legitimate point by testing a person's claimed commitments against a hypothetical example. When did pretending not to understand hypotheticals become a thing?
All of those things are illegal in the country where Bandcamp operates. I think we customers already care to the extent that we ought to, and beyond that we should only insist that legal process be followed.
I don't care so much about Bandcamp that I'll make a personal judgement in their case, and personally investigate the details of their situation.
Market mechanisms have proven completely unreliable at stopping such things, given how few actually give a damn about nestle’s long time child labor and slavery problem.
Maybe not (by some measures at least) but that is the point. They are still the largest food company in the world and one of the largest companies of any kind. Are you sure you aren't buying anything from them? They have a large number of brands and are always buying more. You can't always tell by looking at the package. Not that long ago a website error that mentioned Nestlé tipped me off that a supplement brand I was considering was owned by them and it turns out they now own several very popular supplement brands. I still think it is important to do your best to avoid such companies but it seems not enough people do this to have much effect even in the worst cases.
Reasonably sure, yeah. Not only am I somewhat sure that you can indeed always tell by the packaging (at least here in Germany), I also check the list of companies every 6 to 12 months.
And yeah, the most boycotted company (assuming it is true) means there is barely any effect. People don't boycott, many people don't even care enough to talk, far fewer want to walk.
I'm glad it is easier to tell there. In the US there are no such requirements :(. I've noticed looking at web sites of various companies that there seems to be some basic disclosure requirements in some EU countries that are helpful (like a contact address, which many companies don't have on their website in most of the world).
It's odd how we blame the market mechanism but not the people that "don't give a damn".
Ironically, it's almost as if you (the person complaining about the market mechanism) don't want to boycot those people that don't give a damn. It's inconvenient isn't it? Imagine having to shun your friend, kick out your tenant or fire your employee because they wore a slave-labour Nike shoe. It's much easier to blame a market mechanism.
Those things are bad because the people involved are not able to consent. The journalists and techies working for band camp entered into voluntary contracts that they can leave at any time. To equate the two is absurd.
I love Bandcamp a lot, and as long as they continue to provide great service and treat everybody well, I'll absolutely continue to spend money with them.
And "everybody" does include their employees. If a company doesn't treat their employees decently, they aren't a good company and I will avoid doing business with them.
Okay but this layoff process didn't look like a strategic move where they cut the excess services from bandcamp. It sounds like it was an across-the-board 50% slash. Half the blog staff is still around.
100%. I've been buying music on Bandcamp regularly for a decade. It's where I discovered and became addicted to the synthwave scene. Frankly, there was no other place I could easily discover this kind of niche music over the years and support it the way I could on Bandcamp. I'm also an Album Guy (dinosaur, I know).
But I never cared about or wanted anything other than 1) my music I bought and 2) their not great but good enough search. That's it!
I've worked for publishers most of my career, so I know what half those employees are going through is painful. It has happened to me before, too. But as a customer of the site, I was completely and blissfully oblivious to any editorial staff.
My process:
Load bandcamp.com
Immediately click on the Heart icon, where all my purchases live.
Listen.
This was true on the app, too. I found their homepage utterly useless. None of the artists I'm into ever appeared there. Not cool enough, I'm sure.
It's a bit hard for me to give Songtradr the benefit of the doubt when they start off by kicking out half of the employees, including, by some very weird coincidence, the whole union bargaining team. Kind of supports the argument of the article that all they care about is maximizing profit, which doesn't bode well for artists or users, even if they're not (yet) affected...
The blog was truly fantastic, discovered several great bands and a few obscure genres. I didn't use the social feature either but my guess is that it was good for the musicians.
> The data Discogs has – just like Bandcamp and just like what has been lost at MySpace – is irreplaceable and ever growing. So to have years of culture on Twitter – everything from the continued existence of legacy accounts to the basic usefulness of news organizations being verified – been ravaged by Elon Musk’s vanity. The internet is forever, until it’s ripped away by people who don’t add value to it.
I am not actually sure I agree with the author's premise at all. Nothing digital is forever, if anything, the opposite is true. The internet is completely ephemeral. And it's only through the persistence, hard work, and money of dedicated people that anything is preserved.
Secondly, hoarding lots of data on the internet != a community. Maybe it's the activity that a community could build itself around, or maybe it's the public space that they use. But the reason places like Geocities or MySpace collapsed is because they held feverishly onto all of the data but none of the community.
And maybe it's worth it to hold onto stuff that's been abandoned (even if it's borderline hoarding), but I would argue that it is entirely irrelevant to what went wrong with the Bandcamp situation.
I’m curious on the swipe at Elon. What’s the story with the legacy accounts she references? Also what’s the bit about news organizations and verification? I feel like I’m missing context here. What are these issues about precisely?
I'm pretty sure Bandcamp could be cloned as a dapp and then nobody would have to worry about acquisition, but then, that would cut the middle man out and labels won't like that
It's a natural cycle: Someone makes something cool, they get a huge buyout offer and sell it, the new owner destroys it. Rinse lather repeat. What we have is a shortage of people who make cool things, and an overabundance of corporations looking for things to destroy.
The internet is sorely missing a layer of infrastructure for communities, that allow entities to create, nurture and profit from communities, but not be able to rug pull previously delivered functionality and community provided content down the road. Communities need to be able to gracefully fork if they need to.
Besides protecting a community's investment, this would better align the short & long term profit interests of corporations with their communities.
It's clear that ethics, values and internet protocols need more alignment. The open source community, their licenses and tools, are a good example where similar issues have been (and continue to be) hashed out.
Not to defend Bandcamp in this particular scenario, but I feel there's something people often miss when psychoanalyzing why companies behave this way that I think explains quite a lot.
Web properties, just like any property even in the physical world, become more expensive to operate in the long term. Very rarely do I hear of companies spending less money to operate something in the future than they did early on. Part of this is scale, as things become more popular, it takes more people to keep it running. Another part of it is macroeconomics, stuff they rely on, particularly labor (landscapers in the physical world or server admins, for instance) can become more expensive due to a number of factors. A lot of people, like the author of this post, assume that once a web property is built, it exists forever (like a statue or monument), but that's of course not the case.
When a company needs to make decisions to increase their margin, a lot of people attribute it to "growth," and use it almost in a derogatory way. I think a more charitable way to see it is that it's not necessarily growth (although I'm sure that is a factor), but just to even keep the website running, a lot of times the same decisions need to be made (i.e., layoffs, charging for stuff that used to be free, etc).
When you think about it this way, it really seems like either these sites make decisions like this to continue to exist, or they cease existing. This seems to track pretty well with a lot of cases I can think of. I think some very ideologically motivated people can work extremely hard to keep operating costs down to avoid this scenario (Craigslist comes to mind), but this is not easy, and it's very far from being the "default".
Please explain how exactly is running Bandcamp becoming more expensive in the long term? It's literally just a basic band website template with the cheapest read-heavy cloud storage. Ok, there's payment processing too. But that's about it.
This part is what many have a problem with I think: "...When a company needs to make decisions to increase their margin..."; why? Why do you _NEED_ to increase your margin? You can increase your profit amount without increasing your margin by extending your customer base, by being smarter about expenses, by being a savvier customer to your online infrastructure, etc. But what is the _NEED_ (emphasis is mine) to, literally, squeeze that rock harder to get more blood out of it, therefore ensuring it will crumble in the future?
The only thing I can think of is that there is no care for said future, "I'll squeeze as much as I can now, I got mine, so screw everyone else".
Yes, exactly. With a margin of <0, either someone is working for free or the company is running off of some kind of VC/angel investment, neither of which is sustainable.
I think it's clear that they meant "profit" instead of "margin" from the context of the previous paragraph and the rest of the paragraph that your excerpt is from.
"Goodwill" is fungible only in one direction. Goodwill turns into money but money never ever turn into goodwill.
(Can you think of an counterexample? A small, beloved indie business that was bought out by a megacorp and had consumers love it more because it had more money?)
So, it's like entropy. The latch only moves in one direction. Given a consumer beloved business, the only possible thing that can happen is that its goodwill is turned, quickly or slowly, into money. This is actually ok. Every beautiful living thing will eventually die. It's simply a fact of life. Cherish the good things while you can, because entropy will always win.
It is more than that. It seems like the capitalists are shifting to the mindset that goodwill provides no actual benefit for a business so might as well cash in immediately. Now there is a belief that whenever a customer or business partner leaves an interaction with you with any surplus value, that is an indication that you left money on the table. Happy employees are paid too much. Happy suppliers aren't being squeezed hard enough on pricing. Happy customers mean you missed an opportunity to extract more revenue. People should only barely tolerate doing business with you. That is the new corporate mindset.
This seems extremely spot-on. It feels like there's no space for actual growth, so all that's left is the utterly short-term-focused, zero-sum approach that you describe, where goodwill -- a very useful asset for growth -- is burned for its immediate value. The goose can't lay golden eggs anymore, so let's slaughter it and serve it for dinner.
The relationship may not be direct, but I don’t think it is nonexsistent.
Bandcamp didn’t build goodwill without spending money. In fact, it gained goodwill precisely because it spent its money in ways consistent with building goodwill.
That bias tends to mean that large corporations consume more than they produce over time, as they’re biased towards short term financial results — but you absolutely can grow goodwill with money plus time.
Look at esports, where years of financing community contests have earned good will from players.
Or the numerous charities that corporations like McDonalds run. Ronald McDonald house can and does earn them a lot of good will — which they turn around and spend on short term results.
My point is this is less about entropy than the short-term managerial culture we follow.
Actually, in accounting Money turns into Goodwill when a company is acquired, representing the premium that is paid above a company's assets. I accounting, this value is not amortised, unless something exceptional happens that affects that value (decided by the company's management).
So in the real world, (real) goodwill turns into more money. But in accounting, money turns into goodwill!
"In accounting, goodwill is an intangible asset recognized when a firm is purchased as a going concern. It reflects the premium that the buyer pays in addition to the net value of its other assets. Goodwill is often understood to represent the firm's intrinsic ability to acquire and retain customer business, where that ability is not otherwise attributable to brand name recognition, contractual arrangements or other specific factors" (Wikipedia)
The end-game of private equity/IPO gives incentive for people to create great things in the first place. That they inevitably die on the vine after several acquisitions is still better than having nothing in the first place.
> The companies that buy up sites like Bandcamp are interested in nothing except ensuring the executives’ pockets get lined appropriately.
What about the people who sell sites like Bandcamp? It seems to me they want their pockets lined as well.
To me it points to something fundamentally unsustainable. If cycle of “people who love music/support the artists” create sites/publications/etc. and then invariably sell out to some larger corporate body who dilutes or destroys the operation - what is going wrong?
Like growth needs to continue because just maintaining value is not acceptable for shareholders, maybe the problem is that the founders/sellers need a big payday because just having a steady income is not acceptable (to them).
Running a business isn’t just a steady income though. It’s also annoyance and hassle and long nights. I don’t fault anyone for wanting to get off that carousel.
Seems that most people in this country really do fall into the "temporarily inconvenienced millionaire" category, who favor no rules or regulations for how big corporations can get, or how many business lines they can own under one roof.
First they came for the manufacturers, but I didn't buy raw steel or wood by the train load. Then they came for the programmers and consultants, but I didn't need any software written or any business advice. Then they came for literally EVERYTHING in retail, and I squirmed, but bought Prime anyway. Then they came for my TV and music, and... Hey! Wait just a dad-gummed minute here!
> In March of 2022, Bandcamp was acquired by Epic Games
That's one way of putting it. Another might be that the original owners/creators of Bandcamp decided to sell it, to a company that didn't have any connection whatsoever with Bandcamp's business or mission, and a less-than-stellar reputation.
If we're going to play the blame game we might as well start here.
The problem I have with these sorts of articles is the "they". I love bandcamp, I'm not happy to see it being cut way down, but who is at fault here? It's not Songtradr. And it's not Epic. It's the original founders who sold the majority shares.
They took it from being a company with a culture that they built, and a community of employees and users and musicians, and said "We are ok with this all going who knows where if we cash out now for enough money." They know damn well anything could happen from then on. Any hiring or firing decisions from that point on are a part of someone's money-making plan that (almost always) ends in another sale (whether private or IPO). Did anyone honestly think Epic was going to be a good custodian?
No one has to do that. Songtrader and other giants and all the PE big funds in the world can't make someone do that. The world is full of companies that never sell 50% of the shares because they care about what they have built more than cash and would prefer to keep a modestly profitable business going that employs their friends and families and continues to embody their values. Some of these even take outside investment from private equity funds - I've done diligences for them - where the deal is very clearly that less than 50% is ever going to be for sale. (These are called "minority" or "growth" investment, less common, but they exist a plenty.)
Ableton famously refuses to take outside investment because the founders care more about the thing they have made and their position in the music and technology culture than they do about being as rich as possible. And they have been an excellent new owner for Cycling 74.
I hope bandcamp makes it, because I still think it's a great alternative to other options. But I'm under no illusion that it's the same thing it was in the beginning. That ship sailed with the first transaction.
Cognitive dissonance. Celebrating the possibilities of our free market system (Bandcamp) while simultaneously decrying it as irredeemably evil (Songtradr).
It’s almost as if, at the end of the day, it’s really all just a bunch of humans exercising their free will to make companies and do as they please…
I've been looking at alternatives to Bandcamp, and while sadly Ampled has decided to shutter at the end of the year, https://resonate.coop is a possibility in terms of a new music "business model". For a more standard Bandcamp-like model, https://artcore.com is looking interesting too (I can declare a connection with Artcore as it was created and is run by an ex colleague of mine).
Internet Archive is doing a pretty incredible job of just that.
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