People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
i often wonder what are those thousands upon thousand of people doing in companies whose software can be maintained by like 3 people 🤔🤔🤔
i don’t quite see how the inefficient structure of these companies can be attributed to capitalism specifically, but yes, very inefficient
Efficiency is usually attributed to capitalism because of how fast it can churn out products and make a profit. It’s only concern is to maximize profit margins and grow, though, so it’s only technically efficient at that. Think about how many redundant proprietary standards and products exist. Individually they exist and efficiently create profit for a company, but is it really efficient to have so many different things doing the same thing? Like do we really need to waste labour and resources on 50 different brands of bread, milk, toys, electricity, etc., when under a planned economy we can more efficiently distribute that labour and those resources for the benefit of all?
Precisely, the key thing to remember that words like freedom and efficiency require context. Freedom to do what and efficiency to what end have to be the first questions when somebody starts throwing these terms around. All too often people assume that they’re the ultimate beneficiaries while in practice freedom and efficiency are reserved solely for the benefit of the business.
Or, alternately, even within a firm, if decisions about production were made democratically by workers who owned the means of production, they would be a lot more likely to meet the needs of that firm’s actual work than if these kinds of decisions are made by persons in management whose goal is just to have growth by shoving widgets out the door as fast as possible in an effort to artificially enhance balance sheets. It’s not necessary to plan an entire economy by eliminating 47 out of 50 bread brands and award exclusive contracts to one or two producers, etc. (tho I guess you could argue that this may be advisable anyway) and this argument is a lot easier to accept.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything you’ve said, but for the sake of my mental health i really don’t want to engage in political discussions.
I think a lot of the effort ends up going towards finding ways to monetize the users and to mine their data. The user facing functionality of Twitter is very straight forward, but I imagine far more effort id devoted towards analyzing and selling user data.
Those thousands of people are usually in marketing or advertising
My guess would be marketing analysing the data they collected and $hit.
Kind of related, but this made me think of the Gervais principle, a really good essay looking at the show the office and analyzing how modern capitalist firms work.
That’s absolutely brilliant!
If you have a kanban board, the business can keep adding features and each one you can consult with backend, frontend, data science, marketing and sales, growth and seo, infrastructure, etc. Then you can have lots of Meetings to discuss and coordinate and review how well the process is working. If things ever get slow, you can implement a new code review process and maybe bring in the legal team.