[EGreg]

The same can be said of any startups. They are pyramid schemes until they finally offer utility to customers.

What is sometimes up for debate is whether something is serious utility, such as “owning” a picture anyone can look at, or a digital experience in the metaverse with artificial scarcity.

But then again, under the capitalist system, we need to introduce scarcity even where it’s not easy to do so, in order to recoup initial venture capital. So for example, I remember stories about SWAT teams raising grandmas for downloading movies illegally, or about manufacturing companies all forced to cripple their software with DRM, or the blowup at the W3C, or crackz of popular software that kiddies handed out until all these companies like Adobe went full SAAS. It’s an antipattern that is the direct result of any capitalist system.

By contrast, open source, creative commons etc. doesn’t have that issue.