Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wmeredith 1201 days ago
>judging by the team's background -- André Staltz with Secure Scuttlebutt, Paul Frazee with dat/Beaker/Hypercore Protocol -- I think it's pretty clear the driving motivation for much of the team behind Bluesky is not profit.

Not to be overly cynical, but I just don't care. Things change. When mega-corps and investors come knocking with 10-figure checks... 99.9% of humans will cash out. It's human nature. I've invested my time and energy in many things that have been taken over and destroyed by bad/incompetent actors, virtually all of which had promising starts, or I wouldn't have gotten involved.
3 comments
pfraze 1200 days ago
The organization is a future adversary. You build the technology knowing you won’t be staying at the company forever, and you signpost the things that protect users / your-future-self. This includes open sourcing everything, moving specs to standards bodies when they stabilize, and building the network around low switching costs.

I can’t predict the future. We may screw it up. I’m trying to protect the community from us if we do.

link
rchaud 1200 days ago
That's not a cynical take for anyone who's observed the past 20 years of the web.

Page and Brin explicitly spelled out how advertising could change the incentives of a search engine. That didn't stop them from selling out immediately and letting the VCs install a CEO to 'businessify' the company.

link
scarface74 1200 days ago
Did you at any point think that Google was going to be a non profit?
link
blowski 1200 days ago
I remember being a naive 20-something and believing they’d find a new way of doing business. Maybe a co-op.
link
rchaud 1199 days ago
No I didnt. I did think they could make money outside of adtech as numerous software busineses before them had done.
link
flowingfocus 1200 days ago
And besides the current people themselves changing, there are also many other ways in which incentives can change: new people get into the mix (investors, board members, c-level), people leave etc. I recently formulated it like this: As long as an experience of something that I want to have in my life can be influenced by a single entity I have to hope the incentives of that entity do not change drastically.
link