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BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

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Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#51

Post by randomacct3847 »

driverdan wrote: post #38
peteretep wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would assume that in a sufficiently competitive market (for examples, certainly in the UK, supermarkets), this then gets passed on in terms of price cuts.

It gets passed on in the form of faster checkouts and shorter lines, resulting in less wasted time.

Disagree. Most people are much slower at scanning things than an actual cashier. Things like produce are especially annoying because you have to search for the item (of which there could be multiple I.e. organic vs non organic bananas). And the error rate is high (will lock up if you don’t immediately put a scanned item in the bag area).

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#52

Post by tigershark »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #22

So called “shadow work” is becoming more prevalent. When you choose to self checkout at a grocery store you’re essentially doing work for free (scanning and bagging your own groceries) in place of a paid cashier and bagger.

If it gets me out of the shop more quickly it’s a no brainer! But I’m probably an outsider given than north of 95% of my grocery shopping is happily done online.

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#53

Post by randomacct3847 »

esoterica wrote: post #50
randomacct3847 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a good take. In the supermarket example you do free work to save a company money on labor. You don’t save a corporate entity anything when you drive instead of take an Uber or wash dishes instead of hiring a cleaner.

When you drive to work you’re saving your company money by providing free labor since they don’t have to hire someone to drive you to work.

Bad take. If youre an average worker and don’t drive yourself to work and have no alternative form of transportation a company is not going to pony up and pay for a private driver for you.

How is that remotely analagous to the buzzfeed situation or self checkout

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#54

Post by personlurking »

jacobolus wrote: post #34
bastawhiz wrote: post #20

For me, the real story here is that BF failed to take any action at all to retain a top five driver of traffic to their ad revenue - driven website. Let's say that quiz interactions from McMahon come out to 5% of ad impressions for all of BF. What would a site as big as BF pay to ensure that those 5% of impressions don't disappear overnight? At most companies, I'd imagine quite a bit. Even if we look at the low numbe…

> If someone is providing you a service for free that accounts for a very meaningful percentage of revenue, how much revenue could they be generating for you if you actually incentivized them to do that work? 1.25x? 1.5x? 2x? More? In some cases, it could be less output, or lower quality. Money (or other explicit rewards) changes the psychology of doing work vs. volunteering it. It adds pressure, makes the work feel…

I used to write several short articles per day, over several years. I did it for free and highly enjoyed it, but I was eventually paid to do the same (on the same topic), so I can second the commentor above. Once it was paid, I lost interest over time and saw it as a burden more than a pleasure.

It's hard to make money for creative endeavors, for several reasons, and there are generally two ways to make money from them: put everything into it and hope for the best, or have a "real job" and do the creative thing on the side. Regardless, and personally-speaking, I prefer doing creative things for free because that's the best way to keep my interest-level high.

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#55

Post by ppod »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #19
CM30 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, most platforms and social media sites tend to have the same business model. The only reason YouTube or Medium or Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or whatever else are financially viable is because most people are volunteering their efforts for free. Arguably the same rings true of every wiki, internet forum and community site in general. The question hence becomes 'what point does a site or service go from b…

I would say the exploitative threshold is crossed when the unpaid community members don't derive any value for themselves from the content (or maybe when the community organizer derives significantly more value from it than its users.) From wikipedia they get information, from the Stackexchange network - answers to questions that enable or improve their work or hobby; Buzzfeed's Justin Bieber haircut quizzes, however…

>Buzzfeed's Justin Bieber haircut quizzes, however, do not provide any value to the users, apart from a tiny fleeting endorphin rush, maybe.

Depends on whether you measure people's stated or revealed preferences. Traffic stats make the revealed preferences pretty clear.

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#56

Post by esoterica »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #53
esoterica wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you drive to work you’re saving your company money by providing free labor since they don’t have to hire someone to drive you to work.

Bad take. If youre an average worker and don’t drive yourself to work and have no alternative form of transportation a company is not going to pony up and pay for a private driver for you. How is that remotely analagous to the buzzfeed situation or self checkout

If you’re a cheap shopper and you want to go to the grocery store with the cheapest prices, the store is not going to pony up and pay for a bagger for you because that would drive their costs up.

See the analogy now?

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#58

Post by kalleboo »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #51
driverdan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets passed on in the form of faster checkouts and shorter lines, resulting in less wasted time.

Disagree. Most people are much slower at scanning things than an actual cashier. Things like produce are especially annoying because you have to search for the item (of which there could be multiple I.e. organic vs non organic bananas). And the error rate is high (will lock up if you don’t immediately put a scanned item in the bag area).

The difference is that [at least at my supermarket], in the space of 2 manned registers, they fit 8 self-registers. So other people have to be 8 times slower for it to be a regression. [at my supermarket much of the produce is bagged and barcoded and the machines are quick and somewhat forgiving in the weighing, so it's not that bad either]

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#59

Post by jancsika »

CM30 wrote: post #11
ykevinator wrote: post #3

Stack overflow has the same business model.

To be fair, most platforms and social media sites tend to have the same business model. The only reason YouTube or Medium or Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or whatever else are financially viable is because most people are volunteering their efforts for free. Arguably the same rings true of every wiki, internet forum and community site in general. The question hence becomes 'what point does a site or service go from b…

> Few would say Wikipedia is exploiting its users.

You started with exploitative commercial sites which "tend to have the same business model." Wikipedia doesn't belong on the low end of a concocted poll of "few---some---many" in that regard. It's a different class of service with a completely different governance, content licensing, software licensing, and log access model. Putting it there pretends those issues aren't vital to your set of questions.

Is BF designed so that Rachel naturally learns how the BF sausage gets made? Seems that a) she never had any interaction with decision makers at BF, b) she still has no way to deduce what inferences can be made when people click on BF quizzes, c) she had no access to the decision-making process at BF nor how her work affects to it.

The consequence of that is she was blind-sided by a set of ethical concerns. It was a tweet from a laid-off employee that first suggested her work may affect BF's bottom line and the livelihood of the people who worked there. The pipe that connected her with BF almost seems designed to have prevented her from ever facing any ethical concern whatsoever.

Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

#60

Post by kalleboo »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #49
randomacct3847 wrote: post #22

So called “shadow work” is becoming more prevalent. When you choose to self checkout at a grocery store you’re essentially doing work for free (scanning and bagging your own groceries) in place of a paid cashier and bagger.

I think that's true, but, in some ways "work" is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, long ago, before the invention of the department store or grocery store, the customer wasn't allowed to just roam around in the aisles grabbing products. A clerk had to go and fetch the inventory from the shelves for the customer. Shoppers today do a tremendous amount of shadow work for the grocery store but think little of it. We ac…

One big "mind blown" moment to me was reading about Piggly Wiggly launching the "self-service supermarket" concept. As someone living firmly in the modern world, it was hard to imagine it working any other way than it does now (outside of a detatched-from-reality western movie "General Store")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History

> At the time of its founding, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering them. This created a greater cost, and therefore higher prices. Piggly Wiggly introduced the innovation of allowing customers to go through the store, gathering their own goods, thus cutting costs and lowering prices.

> Customers at Piggly Wiggly entered the store through a turnstile and walked through four aisles to view the store’s 605 items sold in packages and organized into departments. The customers selected merchandise as they continued through the maze to the cashier. Instantly, packaging and brand recognition became important to companies and consumers.[5]

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