I'm trying to build my own software that maybe someday people will pay for. I've also worked really hard to reduce my family's hard costs (paid off mortgage and car, grow lots of our own food, full solar+battery off-grid setup, biogas digester for cooking gas, etc).
I started the NOVC Alliance[0] for people like me that want to build software outside of the mainstream SV/VC culture. Think of it as "BPA Free" for software.
Increasingly, I find myself thinking that the right path is not to build software... It's to be good at software and then find a concrete problem and use the fact that you know software to attack it.
... But I'll admit that what those problems are I can't rightfully say.
Tl;dr: anti-vc, not anti-capital. It's for those building without institutional equity capital structured around venture-scale returns, which is what tends to result in enshittification imo.
Nearly a decade ago I was in in all hands at Google. There was a scandal. I can't remember which one because there were about three of them back to back in a relatively short period of time. And one of the company co-founders, I'm fairly certain it was Larry but it might have been Sergey... Basically responded to a comment from an employee on the scandal with "I want to be focused on creating great things, not on this."
... And the comment put me right back on my heels because, my guy... You are helming a corporation with over 100,000 employees. I don't care what you thought you would be doing at this point in your career. If you are responsible for 100,000 of anyone? You'd best start caring about people problems.
... I think a whole generation of Silicon Valley leadership tripped backwards into becoming partially responsible for / totally enmeshed with other human beings and were utterly unprepared for it. And for all their technical smarts, when it comes to people that grasp for simple solutions. Simple and unworkable.
The thing is, who it donates to is controlled by the company not the employees.
So I would counter argue that it is not just the employees who want that... But one of the parties in this story has the resources of a $4 trillion company at their disposal.
Among others, Peter Thiel or Elon Musk talk about their disdain for democracy and desire for another form of government very openly; this isn't a secret. If you doubt this, I really recommend researching a bit for yourself.
It's not even the first time we've seen this pattern emerge. The Business Plot of the early 20th century is really something that we should be teaching in high school and we just don't.
Powerful corporations in American history have already demonstrated a willingness to back fascism when they think their their core interests are fundamentally under threat.
Future you might disagree with present you. But even if we disregard time, I think millions of consumers would benefit from the opportunity to have competitive markets again. If an actual economic forest fire was allowed to burn, we might eliminate some of the too-big-to-fail corruption and oligopoly that is the norm now and provide space for new seeds to grow.
The problem with this idea which is common in some circles is that most of the businesses involved are commodity or lowish margin. They likely got built either with government support or before the current margin's were a thing. Becdause you can't make a high enough ROI on building a new competitor your seeds will likely die in barren soil never having germinated. In today's markets the likely result will be increased business going to China, India, Vietnam and the like. If you're talking about banking then the worst possible scenario at a national level is that you're borrowing money denominated in a foreign currency. The adventure after 1929 was a result of deliberate policy to liquidate and let it burn.
We already have anti-trust and other regulation to manage this problem, we simply need to use it.
There's no end of competition, the world changes, companies bloat and make bad choices, smaller competitors can react and change faster - it's only in our corporate hegemony that we don't consider that a viable alternative.
Companies also learn from history, and with enough data, can make perfect decisions in real time. The end result, is you end up with “Final Companies”, where a market becomes so dominated an entrant cannot even start up, because it requires operating to even greater perfection just to stay in the game.
When I first came here 15 years ago it was always more about "Bay Area Startup News" than Hacker News, it has definitely always had a heavy capitalist slant. I'd go as far as to say it has more anti-capitalist sentiment now than it ever has had before.
Not what I remember - we had TechCrunch for that. Hacker News was for hacking - we used to flood the front page with Erlang articles whenever things went off track.
Also pro/anti capitalism isn’t the issue - narrow mindedness and a lack or empathy is.
Founders who used to post on HN are no longer here. (They are on bookface.)
There has been an increase in anti-capitalist sentiment on this orange site in over a decade. But in 2026, the majority here (mostly in Europe) are always upset when they need to pay for their tools.
"Open source" is the biggest excuse for developers and some HNers to never pay for anything. This appears to be unique in this industry.
and what are the consequences? angry people on message boards?
According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?
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