zlacker

>>evolve+(OP)
Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.

The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

>>adverb+H53
Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

>>levoca+Yb3
People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there.

But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.

>>Tulliu+2d3
The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

>>xbmcus+EA3
I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.

The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)

(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)

>>Invisi+xd4
I think there should perhaps be a law that any corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the employees. Everybody with an employment contract with this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less; whether they're the janitor or the CEO.

Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.

>>emilec+Lu4
A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.

>>chongl+TQ4
It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.