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Ghost is intentionally built as a nonprofit with set caps on its growth: https://ghost.org/about/

It makes revenue, largely from its hosted service (which is more akin to WordPress than Substack), but it is intentionally built to not follow the VC model.

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That's true, but that's different from the argument in the article that I was responding to.

“It’s much easier to avoid the temptation to implement dark patterns if you have a sustainable business model in the first place.” I mean, one company is incentivized to constantly grow, and the other grows at its own pace. The latter is naturally going to be more sustainable and consumer friendly, provided there’s no funny business going on.

"Non profit" in USA are still very much profit-driven; only stipulations are:

+ must have a board + give away 30%+ of earnings (easily done by attaching a value to the OSS free installs & handling issues w/o billing)

I spent a decade working as a journalist covering the nonprofit space, please tell me more.

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