Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

https://blog.ecosia.org/trees-not-profits/

by erlend_sh • 1 year ago

346 213 1 year ago

blog.ecosia.org

conaclos• 1 year ago

Does anyone use Ecosia every day? How does it compare with DuckDuckGo and Qwant?

rhodescolossus• 1 year ago

They just use Bing and Google Search https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

Yes, I haven't used Qwant though. I'd say it's pretty equal to DuckDuckGo, maybe a little better after they started mixing in Google results. Generally speaking I do think that the Bing powered search engines does much better than Google, but Ecosia had a few specific searches where it's would fail me, that's gone now.

mixedmath• 1 year ago

I've been using it as my primary search engine for a couple of months. It's not great as a search engine. I find their locality of search to not be well-supported (e.g. the search "food near me" works good in google and not great in ecosia).

Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.

It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.

johnisgood4• 1 year ago

I just checked Ecosia, seems to be less censored at a very quick glance, at least in comparison to DDG and Google.

yungporko• 1 year ago

i have ecosia set as my default and use google or something if i really need it, but that rarely ever happens. its not the best search engine in the world or anything but it does the job perfectly fine and does some good in the world, so i'm happy to use it.

aswerty4• 1 year ago

I really like the idea of Ecosia and Steward Owned companies, but as somebody who wants out of the Ad game completely, uses uBlock Origin religiously and pays for services like email and search. I haven't actually used Ecosia, but am interested in others experiences with it. But I imagine in the HN crowd a lot of other people fit the same profile as myself.

dmbche• 1 year ago

You pay for search and email? What services do you use? May I ask you why, if you're wanting to go into it?

dotcoma• 1 year ago

I pay for Tuta (tuta.com) for email.

The only paid search engine I know is Kagi (kagi.com)

dwedge7• 1 year ago

I wish more people would self-host email. Email getting centralised to a handful of providers is no good for anyone.

stavros8• 1 year ago

Not the GP, but I pay for Fastmail because it's just so much better than Gmail, and I pay for Kagi sometimes because it's generally better than Google.

Toutouxc• 1 year ago

In my case it's Kagi and Fastmail. Fastmail primarily because I don't want to support Google and Kagi because it's genuinely better than the alternatives.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 1 year ago

Fastmail and Kagi. The former is amazing – Gmail UX and speed is atrocious in comparison, and the latter is amazing to find reliable, to-the-point results.

robin_reala• 1 year ago

Kagi and Soverin for me. I bailed from GMail after the AMP-in-mail proposal,[1] and EU hosting was a bonus; ended up blogging about my choice back in 2018.[2] If there was a good EU equivalent to Kagi I’d be definitely interested.

[1] https://blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmai...

[2] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/

aswerty4• 1 year ago

Fastmail and Kagi. And I'm very happy with both.

iglio• 1 year ago

Kagi and Proton here

nosioptar• 1 year ago

I pay for purelymail after seeing others on HN say they like it. It costs something absurd,like $0.8 per month, and I've never had a problem with it.

internet_points• 1 year ago

Fastmail for me. Switching was easy. For existing services/logins, I just added forwarding from gmail and didn't bother changing addresses except with the most important things. Most services from back then no longer exist anyway, or have turned into spam, so I eventually turned off the forwarding.

I don't yet pay for search (mostly using duckduckgo), though I am considering it.

gherkinnn• 1 year ago

Kagi and Proton.

I pay for Kagi because it is a genuinely good search engine. I pay for both because I de-googled my life and I understand that one needs to pay for a service one way or another.

The price is negligible in the grand scheme of things. I've had nights out that cost more but gave me less.

herrherrmann• 1 year ago

Not OP, but just checking in as a another happy Kagi + Fastmail user here!

stakhanov7• 1 year ago

Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.

onli• 1 year ago

https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ gives an impression if you click through to the company descriptions, they tend to explain what is meant. Otherwise the term seems to be understood in English, there is a wikipedia article that seems correct to me. Or was that one missing the information you seek?

stakhanov7• 1 year ago

Thanks for the pointer!

blankton• 1 year ago

It sounds like a gGmbH, but the Imprint (https://www.ecosia.org/imprint) still says Ecosia GmbH (-> For-Profit).

stakhanov7• 1 year ago

I looked up the bylaws just now (mostly because I'm procrastinating). It looks like they have a gGmbH that owns 99% of the shares (by number of shares), but founders retain 99% of the voting rights. Founders' shares are barred from receiving dividends, and the gGmbH has veto rights in relation to any certain changes that would fundmentally alter this ownership structure.

dwedge7• 1 year ago

I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO.

You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be taken away from you.

__alexs• 1 year ago

Yes avoiding another Mozilla situation should be a high priority for anyone interested in this area in future.

stavros8• 1 year ago

No, but it aligns with the interests of the consumers better if you're actually targeting consumers (for the recurring revenue) rather than burning cash to get as many users as you can lock in, and then selling to someone who will milk them when they have no option.

dwedge7• 1 year ago

That's true, but the product can still get worse chasing revenue from those consumers.

zbyforgotp• 1 year ago

They can do the milking without selling - don’t they?

HunOL• 1 year ago

Yes, but opposite of "maximizing profits" does not automatically imply targeting consumer or better product. In this example they state that they interested in maximizing amount of tree they plant. Cool, good for them, but it's not something I'm interested in when using a search engine. After one of Vivaldi's recent updates, I was asked to try Ecosia as my default engine, and I did, but after a few days I went back to Google.

MattGaiser• 1 year ago

Even if the CEO makes a million a year, it is a pittance compared to the potential equity value of a tech company.

motbus3• 1 year ago

I would love to see it too. Also relations with for profit companies as well.

But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?

I honestly have no idea

ghaff3• 1 year ago

In the US, the CEO/executive director of a mid-size non-public company would probably expect a few hundred $K/year. Which isn't starvation wages, especially by European standards, but is something a lot of individual contributors in Silicon Valley would consider a relative pittance. And toss in no equity.

fadesibert• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder...

There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).

That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.

That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)

Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.

So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.

Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee

If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.

I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.

Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.

nkmnz• 1 year ago

the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows

Where did you get that data from? The difference might be due to headcount vs. FTE and/or including vs. excluding freelancers.

Galanwe4• 1 year ago

Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.

rendx2• 1 year ago

German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.

stakhanov7• 1 year ago

FWIW: They have provisions in their bylaws (which can only be changed with the assent of their public interest asset-locked shareholder) that restrict salaries to a level that's commonplace in the industry specifically in Germany. In Germany, software engineers and managers tend to make a lot less than they do in the U.S., certainly not an amount of money that's a meaningful tradeoff for giving up rights to dividends and other distributions.

elric2• 1 year ago

Depending on where in the world you are, paying yourself a high wage results in much higher taxes than paying profits in the form of dividends. These taxes may benefit society at large, which may well be in line with their goals.

antonkochubey• 1 year ago

Oh but you can pay expenses to a "consulting company" that your wife/brother/daughter/... owns which will keep their profits and pay off dividents

idiotsecant2• 1 year ago

I don't have any special information here, but I wanted to mention that's it's just as exhausting when people approach every single interaction assuming the worst possible intentions as the reverse. It's OK to not be cynical once in a while.

notTooFarGone3• 1 year ago

Yeah seriously.

"Oh no the entire company has wages - let's assume it's exploitation"

Is basic divisive language that just perpetuates the "world is bad and there is no lesser evil" bs that drives current news fatigue imo.

People are sure that 1 < 100000 but Google Vs ecosia is somehow more muddy.

dwedge7• 1 year ago

You're right. I don't necessarily assume the worst from them and I don't assume the worst in general, but it's difficult to switch off from the fact that this article is marketing, and it's marketing for a company that the author makes money from.

Listening to cool ideas like this is nice, but a little skepticism when sharing marketing is, I think, valid.

52-6F-62• 1 year ago

If only there was this much scepticism around the manifestos of Thiel, Andreesen, Yarvin and the like from within the tech community.

Nah, the guys working to give people options and save trees. THEY must be up to something

lxgr7• 1 year ago

That's certainly a fair point, but currently even the (non-)possibility of shareholder ownership and for-profit takeovers seems to be on shaky ground with what OpenAI is trying.

I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.

maltelandwehr2• 1 year ago

Both of these conditions are true for Ecosia. They have bylaws that prevent excessive salaries.

In 2020, no one there made more than 100k as far as I know.

Source: I interviewed at Ecosia for an interim CPO role.

maltelandwehr2• 1 year ago

The CEO of Ecosia makes less than EUR 100k per year.

At least that was the case when I interviewed there for an interim CPO role.

prisenco• 1 year ago

I don't see a problem with a non-profit CEO (or any employee) taking a large salary. Even if they do, the non-profit structure still removes large shareholders, who are not employees and can have an outsized influence without a commitment to the project or an understanding of its workings.

A successful non-profit that's also able to pay big, healthy salaries should be celebrated.

fsckboy2• 1 year ago

headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit"

or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers.

there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

Profits are not a measure of good. It's just as profitable to mitigate a problem that you caused as it is to authentically solve a problem for people. Profits are a measure of efficacy, but there's no reason to expect that a profitable endeavor isn't making things worse for everybody nearby.

jmcqk62• 1 year ago

Profits are bad when they exist due to unethical cost cutting. Profits are bad when they artificially lower the cost of the good by exporting the costs to other people.

If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, that is not good profit.

If an oil company is profitable because they do not address the environmental impact they have, that is not good profit.

If an insurance company is profitable because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.

You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.

keybored2• 1 year ago

In the narrow sense it’s good. It’s an optimization function, yes. With a wider lens it leads to problems that are just lumped into the big pile of things called Externalities. One of which is ecological collapse. Or just climate change if that sounds too drastic.

Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.

So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).

mcmcmc• 1 year ago

Actually economic profit is an indicator of market inefficiency. Demand is what tells you that you’re selling something of value. Extended profits mean competition hasn’t caught up yet. It has nothing to do with good or bad. If there is profit to be made in a market, firms will enter until it reaches an equilibrium where profit is 0, then when it becomes overcrowded and firms are losing money, they leave the market. This is why anticompetitive business practices are so successful at generating profits, and at the same time are so horribly bad for the free market. In an efficient market, profits converge towards zero.

tsimionescu2• 1 year ago

Profit has two commonly used meanings. One is basically revenues minus expenses, and is essentially a measure of how successfully the company is operating.

But another is what the owners take from the company, after paying all operating expenses. In this sense, profit is basically a form of parasitism on the company: if it weren't for the need to pay its owners, the company could better achieve its goals by re-investing that same money into operating better (buying new equipment, paying its employees more/hiring more/better employees, reducing unpopular monetization to ensure client goodwill, etc). The more money that goes out of the company to shareholders, the worse the company is at operating.

Today, at least in tech, few if any l companies post a profit in the second sense (they don't pay dividends), so we often tend to think of profit in the first sense, usually for tax reasons (taxes on cash dividends are usually payable immediately). But still, a similar phenomenon as the "parasitic" profit happnes: stock buybakcs. The company "invests" its profits into buying back its own stock, as a form of paying out shareholders through increased stock price. And, similarly to paying dividends, this takes away money that the company could have used on operating more efficiently in its core industry.

gdubs• 1 year ago

Nobody wants to see grift, but we should also normalize non-profit employees and CEOs making a good living.

charlie0• 1 year ago

So your argument is that people who do good things must be poor or else they actually aren't good people?

bmicraft• 1 year ago

I'd say they mustn't be filthy rich. Otherwise "doing good" clearly isn't the main priority.

odiroot2• 1 year ago

I'm proud to say that I have worked for Ecosia, though ages ago. Christian, the CEO, is really one of the kindest and most honest people I have worked with. Also 100% committed to the cause, he walks the walk.

Yes I'm just some rando from the Internet, and things might have changed since I've left, but I have my faith in that guy.

justusw• 1 year ago

Chiming in to say the same.

I was there in their earlier years. Ecosia set the standard for me what an ethical company should be like.

And hey odiroot ;)

tdb7893• 1 year ago

Honestly even if they had super high executive pay like current tech companies do but then used the profits for good that's still like 100x better than tech companies now.

reify• 1 year ago

I have and still use Ecosia Daily.

Its a search engine, the same as all the other search engines.

Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia.

Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company.

Ad revenue is then used to plant trees

you cant complain about that

notTooFarGone3• 1 year ago

apparently you can - see this thread.

jasoncartwright• 1 year ago

Ecosia have been going a while, and I don't want to be that guy 'just asking questions', but...

Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.

modo_mario• 1 year ago

Yeah, I've got similar worries since there has been plenty of greenwashing that has happened with planting trees. I'd be sad but also not surprised if some of those trees being planted are sitka spruce wood plantations or so.

slevis• 1 year ago

This is my main problem with Ecosia as well. I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.

MrToadMan2• 1 year ago

It seems they are also diversifying their investments into other climate impact projects like solar (see some of the projects here: https://blog.ecosia.org/climate-projects/).

johnisgood4• 1 year ago

Since we are all doing it: I'd rather they support nuclear energy.

goodpoint• 1 year ago

Shares can’t be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company. No profits can be taken out of the company.

It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?

shafyy• 1 year ago

No, that alone does not make it a worker-owned coop.

aswerty4• 1 year ago

The model they use is relatively well known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership

My personal experience with this model boils down to: you make a company and a charity. Where the charity owns special share categories in the company.

You can then have other share types for founders and investors. These share types can essentially be bought out (e.g. an investor share can be bought for 5x of it's initial value, say, allowing for investment with a 5x cap). Essentially allowing the charity to gain full shareholding at a certain point. But there is no requirement to have these other share types - but they are useful drivers to get the company off the ground.

Obviously this type of investment isn't something traditional VCs care for; other more philanthropic oriented sources are required.

jksflkjl3jk32• 1 year ago

Their website is confusing. So it's a non-profit for planting trees.. that's also a search engine? How are those two things at all related or have any benefit to being combined into one company?

andy12_2• 1 year ago

Because ad revenue can be used for the non-profit? Ecosia's whole thing is that when you use it, you indirectly help plant trees - "the search engine that plants trees".

jksflkjl3jk32• 1 year ago

Do they disclose what percentage of their revenue is donated?

If it's just a token amount, then I'd rather not support a marketing gimmick and would prefer to just donate directly to an organization focused on trees. If it's a significant amount, then it seems unlikely that they'll be able to compete with for-profit alternatives that can focus on developing the best product.

lxgr7• 1 year ago

But GP raises a good point: Are these two things that benefit from any kind of synergy in terms of skills required by the employees working there, target audience etc.?

If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated as its goal when it's incorporated.)

panstromek• 1 year ago

yea, I could't figure out what's the idea either.

dwayne_dibley• 1 year ago

Same, they really need a better landing page.

culi4• 1 year ago

ad revenue goes to planting trees. What's confusing?

They're also now partnering with Qwant to build their own independent search engine index!

hbsbsbsndk• 1 year ago

As someone who has attempted to escape from tech industry employment, the high status and salary are very alluring. If you leave your 6 figure tech job to live in a van by the river and plant trees you're a burnout loser with no money. If you start a search engine that gives money to people to plant trees you're a green entrepreneur with a health salary who can always pivot back to helping energy-guzzling Google AI identify targets for drones to bomb.

mapt• 1 year ago

We have legal structures with which to make statements like this about nonprofit status, structures which bind the promise so that we don't have to take your word on it.

guhwhut2• 1 year ago

They've used those, this is a blog post for humans who care more about the intent from the ceo rather than the specific legal frameworks.

hoseja2• 1 year ago

Trees don't need planting.

Trees need a safe place to grow without saplings getting destroyed.

But trees absolutely don't need planting. Besides, a healthy forest has to go through pioneering stages first.

guhwhut2• 1 year ago

As a forest land owner, trees absolutely need planting. Then they need to be protected from humans and deer and invasive species and disease.

Many trees fail to grow. Most people would be astounded at how many trees don't make it.

globular-toast• 1 year ago

Not surprising really given how many seeds a single tree produces every year. Must be in the thousands.

jgraham• 1 year ago

I think there is a lot of truth in this, but presented in a way that misses some nuance.

It's true that if your goal is to regenerate native forest, which it generally[+] should be where that's an option, then it's indeed true that you want to allow existing forest to regenerate as naturally as possible. The problem in these cases is either land use (land is used for forestry / agriculture / etc. so there's nowhere for new trees to grow) or over-grazing (either by livestock such as sheep or by high populations of wild herbivores such as deer). In those cases you need to solve the underlying problems rather than just counting the number of saplings in the ground (in a heavily browsed area planting may have the advantage that you tend to put in tree guards. Ideally one could instead install appropriate fencing around the entire area to reduce herbivore numbers below the problematic levels).

However you aren't always in that scenario. For example if you're in a landscape with few seed sources then natural regeneration might take an implausibly long time. An extreme example of that would be "regreen the desert" type projects where you need to bootstrap the conditions for tree growth by putting in a lot of trees in a short space of time, although those have a high failure rate. You might also be worried that natural regeneration is too slow in the face of changing climatic conditions, and want to plant trees right for the anticipated climate 100 years hence (although that itself is likely to be controversial).

And of course frequently in the real world tree-planting projects have goals totally unrelated to climate change e.g. just forestry, and as such one shouldn't expect those things to be especially good for the climate, or at all good for biodiversity.

Anyway, I like the idea of companies dedicating part of their revenue to tackling severe global problems like climate change. But I tend to agree that Ecosia's continued focus on tree planting as their headline activity makes them look a bit naive to the audience that is likely to be most receptive to changing products specifically for environmental reasons. Hopefully some of the other project types they're moving into look better in the details than just tree planting.

[+] But not always of course. Converting peat bog to woodland, for example, is going to reduce its effectiveness as a carbon store, and likely reduce biodiversity as well.

johnisgood4• 1 year ago

I am pretty sure "planting trees" is just an oversimplification and goes beyond just planting if they are actually "helping trees".

hoseja2• 1 year ago

I wouldn't be so sure.

lxgr7• 1 year ago

[...] my two promises by turning Ecosia into a so-called “steward-owned company”. This model imposes two legally binding and irreversible restrictions on us:

I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well.

(That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any potential future stewards of Ecosia, but I'll prefer a hard legal guarantee over a promise any time, especially when charitable donations are involved.)

mminer237• 1 year ago

OpenAI is legally bound to its non-profit goals, but the problem is that any law requires enforcement. If OpenAI acts against that public interest, is the Delaware attorney general really going to know and be able to prosecute the case?

I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love to funnel everything to his pocketbook if he could in charge and trusting him to respect the law.

lxgr7• 1 year ago

Definitely; by "hard legal guarantee" I mean the entire thing, i.e. both a law and it being enforced/upheld. (Conversely, it doesn't even need to necessarily be a law, but I'm afraid a strong social norm is even further out of reach at the moment.)

DannyBee4• 1 year ago

"I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well."

Lawyer here - it is basically impossible to do what they (and others) want.

There are few (if any?) countries, where either provision would survive bankruptcy, for example.

They could always choose to dissolve rather than restructure, but if they did choose to restructure, i'm not aware of a country where the restrictions here would be enforced on the successor.

On top of this, in most (all?) countries, agreements not to file for bankruptcy are not enforceable ;)

So that's one mechanism.

In most countries, however, these provisions would be "easily" removable through shareholder + officer vote.

Some companies go pretty far down the path of trying to use trusts as shareholders and requirements on trustees and such to try to ensure such a thing never occurs.

You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.

I also had a friend who explored whether you could legally require the place of voting to be like "the surface of the sun" or something that ensures voting can't occur, but unfortunately, you usually can't.

Companies really aren't meant for this kind of thing - not that there is something better, but what tehy are trying to do is pretty fundamentally opposed to how countries want companies to operate.

If it's really a big enough deal, the "correct" answer is to create a new corporate form, much like we created LLC's, etc (LLC's are less than 100 years old, so it's not impossible)

vessenes2• 1 year ago

It seems to me you could create non revocable trust that gets most of this done, with specific instructions to the trustees. That trust would own 100% of the company, and could issue voting and economic rights akin to shares, with the proviso that the trustee cannot implement a sale.

That said, creditors could still force the sub into bankruptcy in most countries; even then I think the trustee could be instructed to always choose a restructuring rather than a windup if possible. You'd probably put that trust somewhere with UK Trust law.

jjani• 1 year ago

You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.

Doesn't this mean it's quite possible to achieve what they want? Is there a limit on how absurd the statutes can get (at least in your jurisdiction)? Votes have to be held at 3:00AM on Mondays, in person, at the company voting office, which happens to be on top of Mt. Everest?

hedora• 1 year ago

A corollary to the above is that it’s impossible for a company to gather personal information but not put it up for sale.

This is doubly true for public companies, as we saw with Twitter.

lazyasciiart2• 1 year ago

Didn’t Patagonia pretty much achieve this?

evolve2k• 1 year ago

As I understand it registering as a Public Benefit Corporation assists with this and creates an explicit obligation for the directors to stick with the stated purpose in the constitution.

According to Wikipedia: "The benefit corporation legislation ensures that a director is required to consider other public benefits in addition to profit, preventing shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation." ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

Anyone have experience with Benefit corporations and more specifically what legal remedies are available if a corporation once setup as a benefit corporation fails to adhere to it's enhanced responsibilities. Or its directors for that matter.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

But what if there was a way to make a profit planting trees? Wouldn’t this accelerate the rate of trees?

roughly2• 1 year ago

There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is the thread for you.

Blackthorn• 1 year ago

That sort of arrogance is absolutely out of control in the tech industry and it's bizarre because I've never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.

roughly2• 1 year ago

It’s also why our cars keep running people over and our websites keep overturning democracies

yifanl• 1 year ago

The proliferation of Hanlon's Razor has been one of the most damaging things to society.

People as a whole are not incompetent, every individual (and every grouping of individuals) have goals and will take appropriate actions to achieve them with intent, but somehow a neologism has tricked people into believing this is the exception and not the norm.

steve_adams_86• 1 year ago

It can make it difficult to work in the industry because you find yourself surrounded with expert beginners who (generally privately) think they're geniuses.

I love working with people who aren't afraid to solve problems, but are also firmly in the camp of recognizing how clueless we usually are. We shouldn't be terrified of failure, anxious about what we don't know, etc. But man, some humility goes a long way.

The alternative leads to terrible software, team dynamics, work-life balance, etc.

DiggyJohnson2• 1 year ago

law and medicine communities definitely have similar qualities in this way imo

pyrale• 1 year ago

I’ve never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.

To be fair to the other ones trying, we’ve set a fairly high bar recently, with "Let me show you how to run the world’s first superpower".

bigs• 1 year ago

Maybe because others aren’t “disrupting” everyone else

JackYoustra• 1 year ago

econ on hackernews be like

keybored2• 1 year ago

Skepticism should be the default stance when consuming press releases.

In fact it’s better to be arrogant than to be “neutral” (agnostic) towards a press release.

ryanjshaw• 1 year ago

Whenever I catch myself doing this, I try to reframe my concerns from statements (e.g. "the wording here doesn't exclude XYZ scenario...") into questions (e.g. "does anybody know if XYZ is possible with this wording?").

Then what happens is I realize I can go answer that question myself by doing some research, and either I discover my original concern is unwarranted OR I can now state "well they said this but if you look here it's actually XYZ in fact!", which is much more interesting.

DannyBee4• 1 year ago

Yeah, there is just too much here - i started down the path of trying to explain some of the legal issues and problems, and how people often think and deal with them (with pointers to some of the more interesting attempts, etc), since as you say, this is a thing that's been thought about, by many people, many times, but i feel like i'd end up writing 50 comments and so gave up.

stephantul• 1 year ago

As someone who works at Ecosia, thank you for this. I’m used to people being skeptical about Ecosia’s business model. But this is something else.

hn_throwaway_99• 1 year ago

I really wish you would say outright what you're referring to, because to me right now your comment comes off as a bit of cryptic snark. Perhaps there were some comments along the lines you mean earlier, but scanning through the top 6 or 7 comments now, none of them appear to display the kind of arrogance you are implying.

hatthew• 1 year ago

It's not that we think we're the only one who thought about some implication, it's that that implication seems important and nobody has explicitly mentioned it yet, and maybe other people who have also though about this implication are trying to hide it because it's inconvenient.

svrtknst• 1 year ago

a wonderful thing to do in that case is to either ask, or present your concern as a concern. An expression of uncertainty and fear. Not as a statement, or counterclaim, or by trying to propose a solution to the problem you've invented.

The figurative "you", in this case

jtcltk• 1 year ago

E.g., the majority of the posts on https://jefftk.com

grandempire• 1 year ago

It’s an online board. You share your thoughts and challenge them against others responses, and learn more as a result. Is there a minimum requirement of corporate structure expertise required to comment?

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

I don't completely agree with you, but reading the blog post gives off the same vibes as what I imagine Larry and Sergey must've been thinking when they came up with the "Don't Be Evil" slogan 26 years ago.

Everyone starts off with a great intention, but money corrupts and humans are generally highly unreliable long term.

https://steemit.com/history/@taznuranam/let-want-to-know-his...

ryangs• 1 year ago

Epistemic statuses are a great aid in sharing ideas without sounding overly confident.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bbtvDJtb6YwwWtJm7/...

1vuio0pswjnm73• 1 year ago

Rather than make promises of dubious enforceability, why not just share the index as a public resource.

nobodywasishere• 1 year ago

What index? Their results are sourced from Google and Bing

1vuio0pswjnm73• 1 year ago

https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/

1vuio0pswjnm73• 1 year ago

The index: https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/

perrygeo• 1 year ago

Given how bad Google search has gotten recently, I'd give this a try even without the trees. If they can provide a decent search experience _and_ reduce CO2, even better.

culi4• 1 year ago

Ecosia also recently announced a partnership with Qwant to build their own search engine index! This is great for the open web and I'm very excited to see where Ecosia goes next

ponow• 1 year ago

Unless you bound compensation, a proclamation of "non-profit" rings hollow.

imgabe2• 1 year ago

I mean, cool, and ok, but it is kind of ridiculous to consider taking profits from your company "unethical".

And you're taking them anyway in the form of planting trees. You could have just had a normal company and taken all the profit you wanted and used it to plant trees and done the same thing. I guess this is somehow more tax-efficient, but it’s not really any different in principle.

etothepii• 1 year ago

The difference is that the users buying the product (eye balls on search) value it differently. This means you can get your first 1m users without needing to be as much better (maybe you can even be worse) than Google as you would otherwise need to be.

It's a very interesting problem. When starting a company the biggest problem is often getting the first few users. One option is to build something people want - another is to build something your friends want - but another option is to build something the media wants to talk about.

imgabe2• 1 year ago

According to Wikipedia, ecosia launched in 2009 and this is from 2018, so they must have already had traction by then.

Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

Related Stories