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Comment by over_bridge | Hacker News Reader

Every publicly traded company will eventually go through this character arc. They scale as big as possible then the need for share price increases will make them increasingly exploitative and force them to offer lower value to users until they fall into disgrace and are replaced.

Repeat once per generation, to infinity

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There is no "need for share price increases" and none of this is necessary or inevitable. A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification we see in tech. This is an industry problem.

> A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification

And then some PE vultures do a hostile takeover and we're back to step 1.

Any entity that obtains the throne is doomed to fall soon after.

Happened to the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Imperial China, the British Empire, IBM, Intel and AMD back and forth, Toyota, Boeing, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Facebook...

Also presumably soon to happen for the United States, Nvidia, Mysterious Twitter X, TSMC, and others currently reigning as kings in their respective corners of the world.

Note that falling doesn't mean they will disappear into the history books, but they will all fall sooner or later.

If an entity wants to stick around into perpetuity, never go higher than #2 and maybe never go higher than #3 so when #1 falls you don't end up becoming the new #1 out of nowhere.

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