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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Ownership would require that users actually invest their capital. I and most other Twitter users have zero interest in doing that. We have better things to do with our money.

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One doesn't necessarily have to invest money to get ownership of something. For example, I'm pretty sure worker-coops give ownership rights based on labor, not investment. I wonder if Twitter users could be considered as workers, customers, and clients. Workers as in the ones who produce the content and maintain other users' attention. Customers as the ones to whom people advertise. Clients as the people who advertise to others.

Twitter already compensates many of their employees for labor partially with equity. And many current employees were already users before being hired. So you're not proposing anything different from the current state.

I'm confused but maybe I didn't explain it clearly. I'm not suggesting to give equity to people who are currently official employees of Twitter or people who will become official employees. I'm suggesting to give equity to people who might not be considered employees or even contractors and may never be considered employees under US law.

What I was imagining was a way to have more representative democracy in tech companies, not just limited to the corporate shareholders, but perhaps through a cooperative structure that gives decision-making rights to the many stakeholders of the service, not the 1 share 1 vote model.

I guess overall I look at the document in the US that so many of us Americans revere and fight for—the Constitution—and see it as representative democracy and then wonder why we have private companies that don't have similar principles.

If you're doing work for financial compensation such as wages or equity then legally you're either an employee or a contractor. Calling that relationship by some other label doesn't change reality.

It's totally possible to found a B Corporation with a charter that formally gives decision making rights to stakeholders other than shareholders. Many such corps exist and anyone could found one as a competitor to Twitter. However this structure makes it more difficult to attract capital from outside investors.

https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-companies-are-becoming-b-corpora...

> If you're doing work for financial compensation such as wages or equity then legally you're either an employee or a contractor.

Fair point. Apparently AirBnb petitioned the SEC to allow it to give equity to its hosts while still being a private company because that is currently illegal.

> However this structure makes it more difficult to attract capital from outside investors.

Another fair point. Outside investors seem to like to have 1 share = 1 vote, rather than 1 person = 1 vote, because then those with the most financial shares owned (typically investors) can have more decision-making power.

[0]: https://sites.law.berkeley.edu/sustainability-compliance/the...

Equity gives you a share of the money pie, but it doesn't necessarily give you a share of the decision making pie.

The problem that I raise isn't necessarily with the profitability of twitter, but with the decisions that are made about where the platform goes as it grows or gets older. I believe everyone who participates in the platform should have some form of decision power over where it goes, for such a big platform there are many different actors involved but how many of them actually get to make decisions?

Where the profits go is one of the many decisions that are made, as it stands now, people with equity get some of the profits and that's about it. How much is reinvested, how much is paid out, and so on are not really decisions most equity-holders make.

If equity holders don't like where the platform is going or decisions about dividends then they can join with their peers to push through a shareholder resolution, or replace the Board members. This is similar to running a political campaign. But it seems some users and minority shareholders feel entitled to control management decisions without doing any of the hard work.

Twitter is very top heavy in regards to who posts and who gets followers / draws interest to the platform. You want Katy Perry & Co. owning Twitter? It wouldn't be an improvement, it would end in disaster. There's no scenario where you can distribute based on content creation and have it not end up like that, it'd be top heavy (relatively small group of outsized owners) in every outcome. When it comes to content, creators are a hyper minority in society (especially those that do it in a prolific manner), mimics and consumers are the extreme majority.

Ok, so make it not a pure worker-coop. I don't think a traditional cooperative structure would work on this anyway, even though expanding the "work" to people who not only reply but also retweet and like might get beyond the typically 1% / 1-9-99 rule of the internet[0].

Would I want only the "content creators" to make decisions on the platform? No. Right now, they don't even have that much official say, if any. I'd prefer that they have more say, that contributors have more say, and that lurkers have more say.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

This model is already proven to work via Kickstarter, Gofundme, and Patreon. Users already have interest in investing in ideas that _don't even allow them to retain ownership_, like Star Citizen -- it's still a copyrighted piece of work despite taking a ton of money from users to fund their game.

That is hardly the same model. You are describing donations, not investments. Reliance on donations doesn't seem like a sustainable business model for running a huge worldwide enterprise. Eventually you run out of suckers with money to fall for the scam.

Unless you're Wikimedia that is.

Very little of Wikipedia Foundation's donations come from individual users.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/benefactors/#section...

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