It’s cruel. But it’s a business at the end of the day.
We are its customers - our traffic is how people get paid, and if they want to change the menu it is their call.
So people vote w their feet, or not.
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People use “it’s just business” to cover way too many sins and the world is not a better place for it. Do you think the people who volunteered to be community moderators were told they were simply customers, to be disregarded the moment it’s convenient, or do at least they get to be upset at being used and discarded? People deserve to be treated with consideration, business or not.
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AFAIK capitalism was invented for slave trading, Swedish mines and East India Company so it’s evil by it’s basic nature.
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Gentle reminder that commerce, and business, existed for thousands of years before capitalism did, and certainly before capitalism became the driving paradigm for all business.
There’s still room for ethics and morality in business if we can get capitalism out of the way.
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The ‘old’ IBM had five stakeholders. The informal view was that treating them equally was in the best long-term interests of the company. (I’ve no idea if they still use all five, but their behaviour over the years certainly suggests the balance has changed significantly.)
- Shareholders,
- Employees,
- Customers,
- Suppliers,
- The communities in which it operates
Too much late-stage capitalism exhibits the following attitudes:
- Shareholders are venerated above all else, especially in the short term even if prioritising others may be better for shareholders in the long term. Damage to others is perfectly acceptable if it improves EPS this quarter.
- Employees are an inconvenience to be dispensed with wherever possible and exploited as much as possible, otherwise
- Customers are respected (often it’s just lip service) but can be exploited to the extent that the corporation can get away with it (there’s always more customers, or enough who will tolerate the shit, and often they have no choice - monopolies are the ideal to be striven for).
- Suppliers are there to be screwed - they’ll take the shit, they need the business, very few are irreplaceable.
- The communities? Don’t make me laugh. To the extent that PR weaseliness can paper over cracks and maintain a plausible veneer of caring, that’s good enough.
There are some corporate exceptions, to some extent, but at root this is modern capitalism. Maybe it always was. But look at some of the great historic entrepreneurs and their ability to see how a wider appreciation of stakeholders was good for their business.
Lever Brothers and Port Sunlight or the (Quaker) Cadburys and Bourneville, for example. I know of one local business that guarantees a set price for what its suppliers can deliver, even if it is sometimes above market rates, because it wants to preserve that supply chain’s existence (it is a very fragmented one) and maintain its access to it. Your average capitalist today would scoff at such antics.
Personally, I blame the rise of the business schools and their MBAs, plus the toxic effects of the political philosophies of Reagan/Thatcher and their fellow travellers and antecedents.
(Not sure where I was going with this, but I was in need of a minor rant.)
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Yeah I hear you.
Websites/bbs like BB don’t neatly fit into those models as the users aren’t ‘customers’ in the conventional sense of paying for goods or services.
In some ways the users are the goods/services here - affecting traffic but not getting compensated.
In both cases no real ‘contract’ exists- so there’s no real obligation by BB to keep them happy.
Life is strange
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I tihnk there is “a capitalism” that can be ethical, at least for a while, but I’m not sure there’s such a capitalism that can exist without eventually ballooning into big-C Capitalism, which is where we see all the late-stage shareholder-value-cult stuff suffusing everything like so much toxic mycelia.
Whether the capitalism that our current Capitalism emerged from was ever ethical is left as an exercise to the reader.
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