[underbluewaters]

I struggle to think of any institutions the VC/tech/internet era has produced with any long-term value. My assumption is that these companies go through a cyclical pattern of providing value and then destroying it once successful. That timescale also seems to be getting shorter.

Any going against that trend?

[jbm]

I try not to comment on stuff like this but I'm going to make a one-time exception.

Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media (Reddit's default subs, Twitter's political echo chambers). My life is way, way better now than it was prior to the internet, Google and half a dozen other services.

Even HN's favourite boogieman Facebook provided me with insane value. For example:

- While I lived abroad, it provided an easy, passive way for me to keep in touch with my family. Compare that to my parents' desperate 10 dollars per minute phone calls in the 1980s

- I met friends through Facebook advertising for a boardgaming group (that I also ran on Facebook.) I met people from way, way more backgrounds than otherwise possible

- I can passively keep in touch with friends and easily get in touch if I'm in the same area.

People "struggle" to find "long term value" because that's ironically the meta for upvotes on the contrarian SV Internet right now and we internalize those values far too easily. Rest assured, value exists for most, if not all.

[dleslie]

One that seems incredibly important to many:

Small towns are no longer truly isolating. If you're an outsider, for whatever reason, in a small town it's no longer a sentence for loneliness, harassment and abuse. You will likely still experience harassment and abuse, but there is bound to be a community online that you can connect to in order to overcome loneliness.

[mcpackieh]

The flipside is that people who were better suited for life in a small town have lost what the others have gained. Life moves fast everywhere now, your friends and family may step into your life at any moment of the day without notice, even though you live thousands of miles away. All of the big city hustle and bustle reaches out and touches people through their phones and stopping it requires people to deliberately and overtly snub people they'd prefer not to overtly snub.

[Capricorn2481]

I've been alive way before facebook and I can think of a number of ways they have made my life worse, not better. It's up to personal preference whether the trade-off is worth it, but to argue that facebook is a boogieman of ignorant people is really lame.

[fzeroracer]

That long term value you mentioned has little to do with Facebook itself though. In my teens I met friends through IRC and AOL, people across the world and passively kept in touch with them through the eras of IRC, Skype and now Discord.

But what you don't see (or perhaps didn't pay attention to) is the way that Facebook monopolizes that value. They gained that control through ruthless manipulation, advertisement, buying of competitors and more. Then once you have buy-in, you're stuck with the enshittification they force on you because all of the alternatives have died.

For Bandcamp, they existed in the bought competitors space. And we're seeing the cycle I mentioned above occur faster and faster. The goal of companies like Facebook, Epic, Uber etc isn't to actually make a good thing. It's to dominate a market. The value is incidental, occasionally coming with the aquisitions.

[JALTU]

Aside from the corrosive individual/personal effects of social media and the cumulative effort by parents/communities to mitigate, I would agree, net net. (Gen-Xer, as well.)

[mcpackieh]

> Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media

That's a pretty bad selection bias. You shouldn't exclude the perspectives of those who've been harmed by social media. That would be like asking people if alcohol has been a positive influence in their life, but excluding alcoholics.

[cma]

Without commercial spam (which I don't think can be blamed on VCs) it is possible all this would be readily doable through things like email, newsgroups, IRC, XMPP. Inauthentic users/coordinated interests beyond commercial spam would also have been an eventual problem to overcome.

[fsdalkj]

This is like the infamous dropbox comment [1], only instead of you making it as a prediction, you made it over a decade after the company became wildly successful.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[cma]

You think without Facebook the choice would be $10/min long distance calls and that email wouldn't be an option? I can agree the big use case of Facebook probably accelerated internet access but I don't think it would be that severe.

[henryfjordan]

Google Search? You might think it's getting worse but nobody is accessing the internet with raw URLs any more. Everyone uses search.

You can also say what you want about FB/Instragram doing many bad things but you can still be "friends" with people you know and stay up-to-date with them in a pub/sub style (which didn't really exist outside of christmas cards before social media was thing).

Google/Apple Maps are a great resource still.

Apple produced and still produces smartphones which have massively changed society. Those aren't going anywhere

Smartphones enabled app-based services for banks and other institutions and such with a ubiquity that did not exist in the desktop and dialup era.

Like it's so easy to look at how the world has changed in the last 15 years that I have trouble taking your claims that nothing lasts seriously.

[saalweachter]

Do you remember asking for directions, and then, trying to follow them?

[erik_seaberg]

I remember getting a customer address, looking for it in my Thomas guide, and scribbling directions on a Post-it note.

[tsunamifury]

You struggle to see why any company who has been founded in the last 20 years isn't providing long term value.

1) Obviously, first and foremost, this is a tautology. 2) There is little proof that companies that last long term, do so for good reasons 3) What does it matter... at all? Wide and short, Long and narrow, short and sweet, all these forms of impact have nothing to do with their inherent value

[the_snooze]

They've been around a bit longer than 20 years, but Valve comes to mind as a company that completely changed PC gaming in a fairly sustainable long-term way, likely because they're not beholden to VCs or external shareholders. This matters because they've built up immense trust that the games bought 10, 15, 20 years ago will still be there today, with minimal BS. This made people feel OK buying digital-only games. I don't think we'd have all these online delivery game stores these days if Valve had jerked people around to maximize short-term earnings.

[Tanoc]

And tying back into the article and the former parent company involved with Bandcamp, that's precisely why The Epic Games Store has failed so quickly. Epic changes policies to get the most explosive expansion whenever possible, only for things to collapse because the actual users are the support structure. Epic forces exclusives, Epic very heavily try to stop games from storing data locally, Epic can revoke your purchase at any point, Epic can ban you from EGS and thus all access to your games thanks to their DRM, and Epic has no rules other than "no porn" leading to a flood of shovelware, asset flips, and NFT/crypto scams.

And the thing is, Epic are following industry norms for this. All digital storefronts are trying to enforce the same sorts of policies. Get as much "stuff" in front of as many people as possible and have them fork over money to rent that "stuff" with tenuous if any protections for their purchase. Valve really are the outliers in this, and the only others I can think of that do what they do are Itch.io and Bandcamp, one a tiny player catering to a lower market and the other essentially the only survivor in their particular niche. Gamejolt and Soundcloud aren't even really competitors for each of them respectively.

[rexpop]

You're right; if only they worked on real problems and not virtual opiates.

[compiler-guy]

The leaders of the Arab spring credit twitter for making the revolution possible.

Even though it didn’t end as the dreamers had hoped, revolution in a broad region of the world isn’t exactly an opiate.

[rexpop]

Are you responding to the right comment? I was addressing claims about Valve, not Twitter. I heartily agree regarding Twitter.

[tredre3]

You're so right. You're the only one who is allowed to define what is a "real" problem. Every widely popular thing that you dislike is just virtual opiates, after all.

Classic HN comment.

[rexpop]

There are very strong arguments to be made that video games are an extravagant waste of time and resources. There are some decent arguments to be made in their favor[0]. This isn't a question of personal preference. I personally like video games, but we're all allowed to attempt to define what is a "real" problem. That is the prerogative of citizens in a free society.

> Classic HN comment.

Try to be more constructive in the future.

0. "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" McGonigal, Jane

[intelVISA]

If we remove the problems solved in the 90s and/or the ones self-induced we would have barely, if any, 'real' tech problems to work on.

[oliveshell]

Sorry, but what on earth does any of this actually mean?

You appear to be arguing in unequivocal favor of a short-termist, purely profit-driven way of doing business, which is a viewpoint that, to me, needs a whole lot more cogent support than the word salad posted above.

[tsunamifury]

Word salad? I think they are pretty clear points my dude.

[red_trumpet]

> 3) What does it matter... at all?

As a user I care about stability, which requires things to work out on longer time scales than a few years. And since I cannot know or verify if a company also cares about this (and will still care in a few years), I have to trust them. But such trust is hard to come by...

[fckgw]

I'd say craigslist. Still virtually the same as when they launched, small team, still profitable and still providing value.

[i_am_proteus]

I have found some long-term value in Hacker News[0], an internet forum for technology-related discussions sponsored by startup accelerator Y Combinator.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/

[gglitch]

HN? This is a site that is easy to hate on, but there is a fabulous amount of niche knowledge and storytelling buried herein.

[corps_and_code]

Wikipedia is the biggest thing that comes to mind for me.

However, I think that falls pretty squarely in the "internet" era rather than the "VC" era of your point. I'm not sure if that gets at the spirit of your argument (which I generally agree with).

[Pxtl]

But WP isn't a VC company, and it's not publicly traded, is it?

[corps_and_code]

No, I don't believe it is. I think it's part of the WikiMedia foundation, which itself is a non-profit. Could be wrong on that.

I interpreted the word "institutions" pretty broadly here though, since the original comment was talking about a whole "era". Not trying to disagree with the gist of the original comment, just making discussion about an edge case I thought of.

[Pxtl]

That's my point. Non-profits like WP or even benevolent dictatorships like Valve seem immune to this. It's once you get a pure-profit incentive through VC funding or public trading that you get this kind of "we can't have nice things" where public goodwill gets pillaged into money.

[nine_k]

It's not venture-funded (thankfully), but it's definitely tech/internet to the bone.

[to11mtm]

The timescale has shortened because interest rate policies have drastically changed, and suddenly the 'value' of a company carrying debt in the name of growth has changed, in addition to possibly creating a need to generate additional revenue just to service existing debt that must be refinanced at a higher rate.

[dumbfounder]

It's what a lot of web3 believers are trying to build, but it's very hard to both profit and give up control, resulting in a lot of people pretending to do web3 but really it's just web2 with some web3 window-dressing. But, people will keep trying, and maybe they will get it right one day. The dollars right now aren't flowing into web3 though so it may be a while.

[HumanOstrich]

Oh plenty of dollars flow into "Web3" -- they just immediately flow out to scammers and hackers.

"Revenue is way up for our Web3 SaaS this qua- aaaand it's gone."

[dumbfounder]

Yep that's the other problem, people write off web3 because of scammers and other scumbaggery, but there is good work being done.

[HumanOstrich]

That's rather disingenuous.

The problem is that the technology enables illicit activity on a large scale because of its core premises.

The problem is NOT that people write it off because of the risks built-in to the technology, at least for most people. I'm sure scammers and crypto zealots do consider that a problem.

[francisofascii]

I would reframe this and ask, are any institutions providing increasing value or even stable value over time. Plenty of institutions provide long-term value, but the value reaches a peak and then declines. Netflix, Google, SO, etc. provide value to me, but not as much as before.

[scubbo]

Dropbox is still pretty solidly great.

[agumonkey]

I'd be interested in large scale analysis of this part of society. IMO, VC are mostly feeling trends and exploiting the coming wave until it's absurd, then find the next wave to exploit. There are even philosophical arguments in favor of this.

[swagasaurus-rex]

The money can provide incentive for entrepreneurs to create real or perceived value in hopes of being acquired for large sums. That just feeds into the trend, unfortunately.

[stevenwliao]

- Google (Search, YouTube, Android)

- Facebook (Groups, Messenger)

- Amazon (Store, Audible)

- eBay

- Spotify