[lotsofpulp]

What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.

Note that the context of this conversation is someone blaming capitalism for Discord becoming bloated because Discord’s founders have a goal of increasing their wealth.

It seems alternatives to Discord exist for users that do not wish for this bloat, but users do not want to do the work of hosting it (e.g. teamspeak/ventrilo/matrix).

So what I am wondering is where the obligation for someone else to host these online services comes in, and why they “should” not have the goal of increasing their wealth in exchange for doing the work of hosting and servi the online services.

[southerntofu]

> I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.

Well first, we usually don't hear about alternative models because they're mostly erased from dominant narratives (or defaced to the point they make no sense). Famous examples include witch hunting during the renaissance and the abolition of community life (in favor of State/Church control), the Cronstadt and Ukrainian revolts in the USSR... see also "Popular history" as a research field.

Now, whether an alternative model is possible is up to debate. You use "on a large scale" as a premise, so primitivist/individualist approaches will not cut it (although they're valid ways of life for smaller communities). Have you considered the anarcho-syndicalist model? It has strong roots/history in Spain (especially in the colonized region of Catalonia) and was the heart of the popular (armed) uprising against Franco's fascist coup d'État. That is a well-documented historical experience of a large-scale agrarian/industrial (mixed) society operating on a large scale without a capitalist understanding of "profit" involved. Although to be fair it did not last long, as the revolution was eaten from within by Stalin's authoritarian clique (who had smaller numbers but considerably more weapons and resources imported from USSR, and started massacring anyone who disagreed).

We'll probably find common ground in that everyone needs to be valued for their contributions to society, which could be called "profit" in some variants of that concept. However, i would argue that not all activities need to be "profited" from (eg. arts), and that money and private property (in their capitalist interpretations, at the very least) are very bad implementations of that concept, in which a lot of people who are very useful to society are not being remunerated accordingly, while a bunch of parasite who contribute very little to society earn all the benefits.

[arvinsim]

> What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.

Have society really taken on learned helplessness on a mass scale? In a sense that everyone has a defeatist attitude of "we can't think of any system better than current capitalism so why change?"

Or is it more probable that there are some vested interest in keeping the status quo?

[nicoburns]

Some things that could help:

- Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company.

- Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets.

- Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the ability to export data.

None of these things are about abandoning capitalist ideas entirely. There's a lot of merit to them. But they are about tweaking them to that power doesn't solely lie with money and is diluted with power from other sources.

[lotsofpulp]

Those are all interesting and viable proposition, but I would not say they have any relation to the “shareholder model” as you called it in your first post I responded to. All of those proposals, and shareholders, seem like they can co exist.

[andrekandre]

consumer co-op* (owners are the customers) might be an alternative

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers'_co-operative

[nicoburns]

It's not shareholders that I have a problem with, it's giving shareholders exclusive control of companies. They may seem like small tweaks, but you end up with a very different model.

[Applejinx]

Exactly. It's like game balance: you can have a game scenario where there's an exploit, and everyone ends up simply going with the exploit or being crushed, causing the game to become simplified to an uninteresting, uninvolving mechanical process whereupon it just dies, because it's no fun. There are a few people who think they are the big winners because they're the masters of the exploit, but they're whales in a tiny pond and are themselves stifled by how dead their environment is, and may themselves die off, still being the biggest whale in the drying-up pond, and insisting they've mastered everything that matters.

That, but capitalism.