I know I'm overreacting to a single post, but it's a little embarrassing to see so many upvotes and awards showered on this subreddit's version of the 100% science-based dragon MMO from many moons ago. It's great to have passion. It's great to want to bring something noble and well-intentioned into the world. It's great to have the courage to want to challenge the status quo or big corporations. However, those qualities have to be tempered by something that ideas like a science-based dragon MMO or open-source food delivery service often lack: humility. Without humility, you're effectively getting behind yet another CEO, VP, middle manager, or venture capitalist who just hasn't put together the money and support to become an absolute monster yet.
Along this line and beyond the point of mere embarrassment, it's important to recognize these kinds of causes and initiatives as dangerous. Sure, in the case of these little cute ideas where someone's just learned how to use Blender or play with some machine learning in Python, they will no doubt lose momentum in a few weeks or months after the excitement and fanfare dies, maybe wasting their own time and a bit of someone's money if they managed to start a Kickstarter. Hopefully the experience humbles all involved. And, hey, we've all sat around drinking with friends while musing about starting our own bar or something. However, you also get cases like Theranos where momentum isn't lost.
Everyone wants to get behind a feel-good story about a woman who eschewed tradition by dropping out of her “stuffy, repressive” college and sought to disrupt the evils of tech-bro culture and the medical worlds at the same time with a revolutionary idea for blood testing. And, that'd be fine except, again, her whole approach lacked humility. She had passion, courage, and good intentions (if we are to give any benefit of the doubt) to develop a novel way to test blood with a single drop of it, but in having no humility, she ignored every person along the way that tried to tell her she was making decision after decision that was unethical and dangerous (misleading claims, falsifying data, reporting unreliable medical results, etc.) until she was finally caught, stopped, and sent to jail. The entire situation was a lesson in one simple truth: no cause is so important and no person is so special that they are inherently immune to the pitfalls and failings of capitalism. It takes considerable experience, knowledge, and effort to “do it better” than all the other businesses out there, not simple idealism and zeal.
My experience has honestly been that the idealists are the most dangerous. The realist capitalists and CEO's at least know the in's and out's of the system they're playing in, having some foresight about how to navigate what often be a complex and nuanced space of all kinds of forces with their own values and priorities. They can still be monsters, but at least they have humility enough to recognize they are locked in the capitalist system and have some sense of there being rules to follow (however paltry, toothless, or arbitrary). The idealists though think they are smart enough, noble enough, passionate enough to co-opt capitalism in service of their cause, seeing themselves as some rogue outsider who will disrupt the system instead of just one more baby CEO seeking personal wealth, glory, or power in the system. The danger is that as a perceived outsider, they don't feel compelled to follow rules. They are so smart that if things like data security and scalability haven't crossed their mind (or are just buzzwords they've learned to put as bullets in a presentation without any plan behind them), then they must not be important. They are so noble that it's okay if their ideas implicitly call for many folks to offer their labor for cheaper than even the evil capitalist insiders expect, maybe even for free. They are so passionate that any criticism or diversity of thought is seen as a betrayal and must be stifled. Again, it's all just a lack of humility.
I've seen it firsthand in my industry. I've watched one VP get ousted for letting profits stagnate and blah-blah-blah while a new VP comes in with bright eyes and an idealist plan to disrupt the industry. Really provide a next level service that has been the holy grail of sorts in our world. And, what happened? The entire damn division was tanked by their decisions because after a year on the job, they realized it is all more than just big ideas. They thought they were immune to the pressures of shareholder expectations, client demands, and worker needs, but where the old VP had the humility to know they weren't immune and at least survive in the space to keep everyone employed, this new knucklehead lacked that humility, cracked under the pressure, and got caught falsifying data to make clients happy which destroyed the department.
Yes, it's all just symptoms of the greater rot that capitalism as a whole breeds, but it's silly in this subreddit of all places to celebrate some of the worst symptoms just because they say all the right things we want to hear.
TL;DR: Don't offer your time, money, or attention to feel-good ideas that are simply the same old capitalist pitches and proposals just with a new coat of paint that has been tailored to catch the eyes of you and your demographic (i.e. “Hey guys, fuck the Man! I have a new open-source, decentralized, blockchain-enabled, organic way to use your phone to cure cancer that those corporate elites don't want you to know about.”)