People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
Many people (e.g. Eric S Raymond) would argue that this type of efficiency gain from switching to a communist economic model is only experienced in the software industry. The reasoning behind that would be that software (and other digital
contentworks) has special traits: it is cheap to produce and infinitely reproducible (the economics of free software are essentially post-scarcity economics).On the other hand, certain industries, like the mass production of clothing and mining for precious metals, would massively lose out as a result of a communist economic model because they can no longer extract maximum value from laborers by underpaying them and must provide quality working conditions, which would result in a decrease in productivity. Additionally, there would be an allocational problem: if a resource is scarce, where should it be sent, and for what purpose should it be used?
It should be noted that I’m not intending to criticize socialism in any way - it’s just that socialists should gain a better understanding of economics so that socialism can be presented as a highly sophisticated alternative economic system rather than some knee-jerk ramblings.
EDIT: Crossposted your post to /c/debatepolitics in a shameless effort to promote my community :)
It surprises me how many people in the open source community are libertarians when open source embodies so many traits of humans interactions under socialism. Not to mention the absurd amount those people criticize capitalist practices in software just like Twitter but never take it a step further.
