• thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    privately held can be bad, but they aren’t inherently so. it’s possible for a decent person/idealogue to have a decent product that people want to buy at a fair price. they’re just very easily beat out by bigger brands most of the time because they aren’t ruthless like the big ones.

    • bastion@feddit.nl
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      5 months ago

      Nailed it.

      There’s a legal obligation to extract the most value for your shareholders. This doesn’t apply in sole proprietorships or partnerships with a more centralized ownership, where there’s the realistic potential to have a conversation with one of the others (or internally) and say things like “let’s do y, because doing x would be fucked, even if it made me more money.”

      In a publicly traded company, you can literally be sued by your shareholders for not putting profits first. This puts a background pressure that slants the odds in favor of enshitification. And whole industries are based on utilizing slightly uneven odds, so that has a real impact.

      As you said - without being publicly traded, people can still be evil, but they aren’t nearly as likely.