Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Well, it matters a whole lot once you choose to bring up "One share, one vote" in response to "One person, one vote", since it shows that it's either wrong or shows a gross misunderstanding of democracy.
A hypothetical country with multiple classes of citizens that had different rights and voting powers would not inherently be undemocratic. It's not something I'm in favor of but equality != democracy.
But said country would not fulfill "One person, one vote". Why should we weaken such fundamental ideas by allowing them to mean the opposite of their real meaning?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
You are asserting this "one person one vote" definition of democracy. I am questioning it. Where did this constraint on what qualifies as "real" democracy come from?
Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
> You are asserting this "one person one vote" definition of democracy. I am questioning it. Where did this constraint on what qualifies as "real" democracy come from?
I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?
> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.
Yes, kmeisthax was the first to state it in this thread. On that basis you referred to a "gross misunderstanding of democracy" and later used the term "newspeak" leading me to believe that you hold that definition to be correct. You (and kmeisthax, and possibly others) are asserting it to the extent that a rationale for that definition has not been provided.
You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.
Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.
I mean, North Korea also claims to be a democratic republic, but they also have "a great deal of institutional inequality" - to put it lightly. You have one guy with basically all of the power[0]. I think it would at least be safe to claim that North Korea is not democratic because of this.
As for a rationale as to why I would think this: Democracy literally means "rule by the people". If you have so much institutional inequality that one guy can out-vote or veto literally everyone else, then how do the people actually rule in any meaningful way?
I will admit that this argument is very voting-centric. Democracy does not mandate the use of voting. You could, for example, have a democracy in which the exercise of democratic power is mediated entirely through protests. This is how disenfranchised populations in the US and elsewhere wound up getting suffrage in the first place. But protests are also an incredibly inconvenient means of exercising power. When the people take power the first thing they do is usually to implement a voting mechanism anyway, so it's not inherently invalid to assume that democracy implies voting.
Of course, this doesn't work in reverse: voting does not imply democracy. Shareholder voting is a system that exists specifically to ensure the people who loaned the business its start-up capital can exercise effective and indefinite control over it. This is voting built to enforce plutocracy (rule by the rich). Furthermore, the other pseudo-democratic features of publicly held companies, like the fact that anyone can push through a shareholder resolution as a form of protest, are being slowly pared away. Texas in particular is trying to pull corporations away from Delaware on the basis that they'll shut up the small activist shareholders trying to do democratic protest in their board meetings or through lawsuits. Does this still sound like democracy to you?
[0] I am skipping over a lot of internal politics among North Korea's ruling elites, but I don't think it's necessary to go into any great detail other than to mention that such people exist.
IMO it matters roughly as much as it's common. Do you know any country where, say, 10% of public companies have non-voting stock your can buy and voting stock your cannot easily buy? 20%? 50%?
Of course, nothing actually strongly governs who is on the board.
If I own majority voting shares in a company the board isn't a democratic body, it's a body that I fully control.
I think that in the employer employee relationship that we have come up with this idea that owning the company allows you to exert unlimited control over employees and to tell them that their voice doesn't matter, because they don't own the company. But the company wouldn't exist in its form without their labor, which is why they should have a seat at the table.
>Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
damn, I guess feudal aristocracies or oligarchical nations are also democratic.
If you are describing how a US corporation that is not a worker cooperative is run as a democracy, you either dont know what the term means or you are being in bad faith.
when a literal handful(as in the number of people could be counted between both hands) can decide the fate of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it "largely democratic" is lolworthy.
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
We picked democracy because it is very difficult for a citizen to move to a different country/start their own if they are unhappy. Democracy is a fix for that power imbalance.
By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.
Modern socializing is all about appreciating non-existent achievements by non-existent people so that everyone knows you’re cool. Or as best stated: “Life will find a way.” - Dr. Real Human Jurassic Park Character
Hey, what a great joke, appreciate it, tipping my hat towards you, sir.
I also find many real-life situations come to reflect stuff that happened on my favorite movies and stories and I sure also quote them every chance I have.
My wife hates that but her boyfriend likes it, we found common ground there, only thing is he's more a DC-guy if you know what I mean (I think Marvel has a much richer multiverse, anyway).
I don't want to derail the conversation obviously, just wanted to let you know ignore the naysayers (I see a few detractor comments on this thread already) and let us true fans keep enjoying our lore!
Good day, fellow M'arvel enjoyer! I like both DC and Marvel but my girlfriend (FtM) has a very high IQ so is only able to enjoy Marvel. She even got me the Tony Stark Funko to add to my collection!
Taking the mick out of the stereotypical capeshit-loving man-child completely devoid of self-respect and dignity. Cue the YouTube vid of that doughy soy-boy crying with excitement as he watches a trailer for the newest Marvel slop.
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
> Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
Not just (forking and) signing, but considering he runs the "official WordPress plug-in repository" as well, he pretty much conducted a supply chain attack.
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
you are less likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else though, so unless somebody is targeting you, those vulnerabilities might not matter all that much
I'm saying that every web property I've ever seen logs for is swept at least daily for /wp-admin/... and similar URLs. I've also seen WP instances left unpatched become completely taken over by spammers in a matter of days.
Any software package with an install base of 1, whether human coded or vibe coded, by junior engineers or by Fable, will not have an organized ecosystem of "webscale" exploiting, unless the property in question is of incredibly high value. In that event, dedicated black-hats and state actors will always be targeting it explicitly no matter what software it runs.
A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.
In most web frameworks its not terribly hard to extern content (you probably do this already for translations) and just have a nice little yaml or json thats easily edited.
> I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates.
I remember Facebook's corporate news sites [1] were running on WordPress.
Gods, I worry this is going to be how people view relationships in the future.
It's not the code or product, but the user base and time with it. Google, meta, etc aren't successful because of their product. It's because of the momentum and product scale. You could make a new Instagram easily. You can't get the user base to switch easily.
The examples you gave though are about switching cost, and network effect, and defaults baked into browsers by paid placements (e.g. Firefox, Apple).
And I even get that large, complex WP-based sites at least seem to have a lot of inertia keeping them there.
I'm just saying that I'm shocked Wordpress is something that anyone thinks still has upward momentum left in it. I would expect that 50 competitors to WP would be expanding their abilities to replace it, replicating and improving all its features, adding import functionality, and building their own in-house plugins that would probably work for 90% of deployments without the malware risks of the wider WP plugin world.
And yes, I get that WP is still Free Software, but in my career I've seen most businesses paying for all-inclusive "WP hosting" (including what I assume is most of the work, patching). So the competitors I'm speaking of would specifically be competing with WordPress.com SaaS, rather than the "idea" of WordPress (The software).
I guess there probably are that many alternatives, I'm just shocked the WP branding has been enough to keep it relevant despite its disadvantages, bad security reputation, and insecure architecture.
I haven't heard of anybody but Cloudflare using it though.
Name recognition still means a lot. WordPress is baked into most hosting platforms now so SMBs just reach for it. Most of them won't hear about this b.s. and honestly the platform can continue to run on momentum for years.
There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.
> There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.
To be fair, I think a lot of people would have far better user experiences if they asked Claude/ChatGPT/preferred AI to rip out nag screens that many of the plugins are riddled with.
That's probably the first step to them vibecoding their own sites, but most people would likely just want to stay on the WordPress sites they already have, because they don't want to spend time and effort getting up to speed with new UX, or worse, being their own website product manager if they have to vibecode something from scratch. (Until something catastrophically breaks and they need to do a new greenfield site, I guess.)
I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think
The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons.
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.
107 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadFunny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.
> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
From kmeisthax? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683985
I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?
> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.
You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.
Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.
As for a rationale as to why I would think this: Democracy literally means "rule by the people". If you have so much institutional inequality that one guy can out-vote or veto literally everyone else, then how do the people actually rule in any meaningful way?
I will admit that this argument is very voting-centric. Democracy does not mandate the use of voting. You could, for example, have a democracy in which the exercise of democratic power is mediated entirely through protests. This is how disenfranchised populations in the US and elsewhere wound up getting suffrage in the first place. But protests are also an incredibly inconvenient means of exercising power. When the people take power the first thing they do is usually to implement a voting mechanism anyway, so it's not inherently invalid to assume that democracy implies voting.
Of course, this doesn't work in reverse: voting does not imply democracy. Shareholder voting is a system that exists specifically to ensure the people who loaned the business its start-up capital can exercise effective and indefinite control over it. This is voting built to enforce plutocracy (rule by the rich). Furthermore, the other pseudo-democratic features of publicly held companies, like the fact that anyone can push through a shareholder resolution as a form of protest, are being slowly pared away. Texas in particular is trying to pull corporations away from Delaware on the basis that they'll shut up the small activist shareholders trying to do democratic protest in their board meetings or through lawsuits. Does this still sound like democracy to you?
[0] I am skipping over a lot of internal politics among North Korea's ruling elites, but I don't think it's necessary to go into any great detail other than to mention that such people exist.
Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.
"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."
Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.
If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.
If I own majority voting shares in a company the board isn't a democratic body, it's a body that I fully control.
I think that in the employer employee relationship that we have come up with this idea that owning the company allows you to exert unlimited control over employees and to tell them that their voice doesn't matter, because they don't own the company. But the company wouldn't exist in its form without their labor, which is why they should have a seat at the table.
damn, I guess feudal aristocracies or oligarchical nations are also democratic.
If you are describing how a US corporation that is not a worker cooperative is run as a democracy, you either dont know what the term means or you are being in bad faith.
when a literal handful(as in the number of people could be counted between both hands) can decide the fate of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it "largely democratic" is lolworthy.
Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.
(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.
I learned Duck-typing from Ruby: if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck -- it's a duck.
Applying this to Sam: he's white.
* American Indian or Alaska Native
* Asian
* Black or African American
* Hispanic or Latino
* Middle Eastern or North African
* Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
* White
I also find many real-life situations come to reflect stuff that happened on my favorite movies and stories and I sure also quote them every chance I have.
My wife hates that but her boyfriend likes it, we found common ground there, only thing is he's more a DC-guy if you know what I mean (I think Marvel has a much richer multiverse, anyway).
I don't want to derail the conversation obviously, just wanted to let you know ignore the naysayers (I see a few detractor comments on this thread already) and let us true fans keep enjoying our lore!
?
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
The story is that Adi was less enthusiastic (but still a card-carrying member).
Not just (forking and) signing, but considering he runs the "official WordPress plug-in repository" as well, he pretty much conducted a supply chain attack.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
I'm saying that every web property I've ever seen logs for is swept at least daily for /wp-admin/... and similar URLs. I've also seen WP instances left unpatched become completely taken over by spammers in a matter of days.
Any software package with an install base of 1, whether human coded or vibe coded, by junior engineers or by Fable, will not have an organized ecosystem of "webscale" exploiting, unless the property in question is of incredibly high value. In that event, dedicated black-hats and state actors will always be targeting it explicitly no matter what software it runs.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
I remember Facebook's corporate news sites [1] were running on WordPress.
I just checked. Some of them still are.
Oh, the irony.
[1] e.g. https://about.fb.com/news/
It's not the code or product, but the user base and time with it. Google, meta, etc aren't successful because of their product. It's because of the momentum and product scale. You could make a new Instagram easily. You can't get the user base to switch easily.
And I even get that large, complex WP-based sites at least seem to have a lot of inertia keeping them there.
I'm just saying that I'm shocked Wordpress is something that anyone thinks still has upward momentum left in it. I would expect that 50 competitors to WP would be expanding their abilities to replace it, replicating and improving all its features, adding import functionality, and building their own in-house plugins that would probably work for 90% of deployments without the malware risks of the wider WP plugin world.
And yes, I get that WP is still Free Software, but in my career I've seen most businesses paying for all-inclusive "WP hosting" (including what I assume is most of the work, patching). So the competitors I'm speaking of would specifically be competing with WordPress.com SaaS, rather than the "idea" of WordPress (The software).
I guess there probably are that many alternatives, I'm just shocked the WP branding has been enough to keep it relevant despite its disadvantages, bad security reputation, and insecure architecture.
Cloudflare did that:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/
I haven't heard of anybody but Cloudflare using it though.
Name recognition still means a lot. WordPress is baked into most hosting platforms now so SMBs just reach for it. Most of them won't hear about this b.s. and honestly the platform can continue to run on momentum for years.
There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.
To be fair, I think a lot of people would have far better user experiences if they asked Claude/ChatGPT/preferred AI to rip out nag screens that many of the plugins are riddled with.
That's probably the first step to them vibecoding their own sites, but most people would likely just want to stay on the WordPress sites they already have, because they don't want to spend time and effort getting up to speed with new UX, or worse, being their own website product manager if they have to vibecode something from scratch. (Until something catastrophically breaks and they need to do a new greenfield site, I guess.)
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.