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.
Twitter is a natural monopoly, due to network effects. Monopolies can ignore market pressure, since competing with them takes a lot of initial resources. This is why I’m such a fan of Mastodon, as federation enables competition (see related discussion here: https://lemmy.ml/post/38605).
It’s hard to compare the two on efficiency however, as it could be argued that 5,000 employees are needed to maintain this monopoly (which in turn would enable extracting greater return from a captive audience than having to compete would). If Mastodon never takes off (which I hope is unlikely), then maybe the costs of maintaining a monopoly are actually worth it, even if they’re high.
Specifically, a lot of the effort is directed towards finding ways to monetize users. Open source model can deliver the core functionality with very modest resources. Meanwhile, capitalist model introduces monetization mechanism like ads, tracking, and user analytics in addition to that. From user perspective these can largely be seen as a net negative. So, this effort can be seen as a waste since it exists for the benefit of the business owners as opposed to providing any sort of functionality that the users are interested in. If there’s no business than all that work never needs to be done in the first place.
I think the real question is “efficient at what?”. I’m on the same page as you overall regarding open source and whatnot, but if you want to make a boatload of money, Twitter (and monopolies, and all sorts of consumer-hostile practices) is arguably more efficient for that than open source projects.
That’s precisely the crux of it.