Why is a Democratic Social Network Better?
Corporations provide a product to serve their customers. Correct? Well, sort of, but it's not the whole story.
Corporations, first and foremost, serve their shareholders. Because serving the shareholders entails
making money, and money comes from customers, corporations end up providing a product to their customers.
But quite often, that product will be inferior because it is designed to make more money for the corporation
rather than make the customers happy.
That's why you have situations like Facebook's
Open Graph,
an unnecessary and harmful alteration to Facebook
which caused outrage amongst many users, or the way
Google+ run things.
Facebook pushed ahead with the move knowing full well that it doesn't help the
users, and that some people would protest against it, because of business development factors. In other words,
Facebook stands to make more money from the users, making the shareholders happy.
That's why it's so cool that at Zurker, the shareholders ARE the members who use Zurker, and all members have a chance to be
shareholders. Democracy reigns, and products which are designed to be deliberately unsatisfactory in the interests of profit
would never, ever happen.
New features are discussed and voted on. Indeed, all new feature ideas are submitted by the users, under Ideas. Being fully
democratic, Zurker is better able to develop a superior product, which will result in more enthusiastic usage by everyone,
keeping both the members and the members wearing their shareholder hats happy.
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