HACKER Q&A
📣 zigurat

Who's the current “Don't Be Evil” corporation?


We all know that corporations sooner or later get into a spiral of enshittification and become a transnational data-grabbing, climate polluter, lock-in business problem.

However, some take longer to reach this point and we can at least enjoy their offerings in the mean time with less guilt.

So, what are the current least evil corporations?


  👤 bicx Accepted Answer ✓
Probably some company that is privately owned, pays its employees well, doesn’t sacrifice integrity for growth, and admits/corrects mistakes. We probably haven’t heard of them because the more growth-focused corps get the headlines.

👤 hydeout
Not a tech company, but Patagonia stands out currently as a "don't be evil" company. They recently dedicated their profits to go tackle climate change and protect land. Sustainability seems to have been a goal by the founder for a while (repairing or recycling clothes, using leftover scraps of fabric, etc.)

👤 softwaredoug
The “don’t be evil” comes out of an extremely optimistic techno-futurism from the early Internet I’m not sure exists anymore. At best the current “optimist” techno futurist folks are at best talking about how to mitigate the negatives of things like AI.

I’d also say at this exact moment, trust with tech execs writ large is low, given fairly universal layoff trends.


👤 reaperman
Probably Anthropic. [0] Founded on pro-social values, but controlling a technology which will be very difficult to refrain from ever-increasing monetization over time. Literally trying to position themselves as "The AI company, but not evil!"

0: https://www.anthropic.com/company


👤 lockhouse
I think it's a mistake to anthropomorphize corporations. They are filled with people, some of whom are evil, some of whom are not, and some of whom are somewhere in between.

👤 w10-1
"Don't be evil" is a very weak statement of ethics; let's hope it's not the high-water mark!

Corporate evilness is a function of market forces over time, as limited by culture. You'd have to look for a corporation whose market grows as a result of being good. For Google initially, to get people to trust it with email and search to get the scale required for its flywheel. Also note that any culture strong enough to resist market forces requires strong selection mechanisms if not group-think and sacrifice.

One example is Veeva, a public benefit corporation that does Java infrastructure for pharma trials. Even more than most enterprise X-AAS companies, they have a small number of large customers, so they grow by being compliant to their concerns. Normally competitors would not share infrastructure, but here it helps since the pharma companies both gain leverage against the FDA by having consistent processes, and share implementation of common FDA mandates. It helps that software infrastructure for trials is definitely not a differentiator in the market for drugs (though it can be a moat against competitors if properly designed).

The head of Veeva took this opportunity to remake the company as a public benefit corporation, with an internal culture of service (albeit with a managerial bias towards data-driven decisions circa 2018). Mostly experienced dev's with families.

A pure-culture play is Expensify, which does expense reporting. They know the business is not sexy, so they opted for a thoroughly employee-oriented culture to attract people who have a good work-life balance. They support work-anywhere and have had regular employee work retreats in various countries. They have their own tech stack, so it's insular both ways. Lots of younger wondering self-taught good people. A rare fintech success story.

Of course, the best example is Apple. Services and high prices notwithstanding, they decided to put themselves squarely behind the user instead of abusing them through ads and such. Famously strong culture, surprisingly decentralized, fantastic stack for the legacy and scale, etc. Apple is the only company I know of any size that intentionally shapes their market and inputs to do good. (Whether history will forgive them their benefits to China is another question.)


👤 Der_Einzige
Obviously huggingface.

If you're going to downvote, you should explain why huggingface is evil right now. They're literally the bastion of open source AI.


👤 Spastche
Arizona Iced Tea

👤 upsordowns
Certainly nothing listed on NSE!

👤 jrflowers
Craigslist

👤 MountainMan1312
Moral relativism is a trap. You end up supporting evil things; all they have to do is show you a slightly more evil thing. That's how the ruling class tricks people into voting Democrat, all they had to do was show everyone a Republican.

You mention several things: enshittification, data-collection, pollution, lock-in... What you don't mention is worst part: all capitalists/corporations are thiefs, they get a free ride off the backs of people who actually do the work. There's a reason it's called "wage slavery".


👤 jvalencia
frame.work

👤 justusthane
Cloudflare. Builds really cool tech and currently seems to operate with good intentions, but has the potential to be hugely destructive to the open internet, and big enough to be unstoppable.

👤 dotcoma
Basecamp? Tutanota?

👤 Mystery-Machine
OpenAI