Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–86 of 86 posts

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

#81

Post by jacobolus »

lsc wrote: post #68
fbelzile wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what jacobolus is saying is after a certain point, more money won't necessarily lead to better quality of work. [0] https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work

My argument is that if you pay less than your competitors, you can't expect to hire and retain the best people. edit: More to the point, I think this idea that people don't work for money is one pushed by management at the expense of the workers, and when I hear employers putting that out there, I assume those employers are... bad to work for, because they think that by being manipulative, they can get you to work fo…

Much of the best work I know about was done as people’s hobby projects, self-selected school projects, self-selected projects funded by some kind of patronage system with money not directly tied to output, etc.

I don’t employ anyone, so you don’t need to worry about whether I would hire you to keep doing your hobby and kill your love for it.

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

#82

Post by xyzzy123 »

ddxxdd wrote: post #37
phillipcarter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One would assume I severely doubt it's the case. Besides, businesses aren't typically interested in having a competitive market anyways. It's probably more profitable to not lower prices at all and lobby to make it harder for competitors to lower prices . . . or just conspire with major competitors to keep them higher. Both actions have a strong historical precedent in US markets, at least.

Businesses are generally more competitive than people realize. The average person believes that corporate profits are typically in the 36% range, which is 5X higher than what reality shows: http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average...

Partly this is because profits are taxed, so it makes sense to shift profit into some other accounting bucket like capital expenditure / growth, offshore ip etc.

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

#83

Post by driverdan »

owenmarshall wrote: post #48
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.

“Please place the item in the bag.” “Please remove the last scanned item from the bag and scan it before placing it in the bag.” “Please wait, help is on the way.”

When was the last time you used self checkout? I haven't seen this problem in years. Older systems had this problem but it has been fixed for a while.

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

#85

Post by smsm42 »

Wait, so these annoying quizes that keep popping on all social media and that force me to block people because it becomes intolerable - somebody wrote 700 of them just for the fun of it, without payment? This is.... I have no words. I assumed at least somebody made a living out of it, however weird is this way of making money. But just producing clickbait spam filler for free? Surprises ever day.

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

#86

Post by oliwarner »

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…

I think the logic is there'll always be another naive teenager willing to work for free.

And they're probably not wrong. Bright-eyed teenage students are a self-renewing resource. Industries like BuzzFeeds thrive on them. As long as they keep them coming in as content consumers, they'll never be lacking of people willing to spend time creating content for them. BF can dole out status in a semi-respected field. That alone has value to the students.

This isn't that new. Plenty of companies seem to be A-Okay not paying interns to do real jobs. Apprenticeships in the UK pay just £3.70/h. And every junior position requires 3 years industry experience. It's no surprise that people are forced into working for pennies.

The only real problem for BuzzFeed here is people being able to kick up enough fuss that makes them look bad. Given how the rest of the world treats young workers, I think they'll be fine.

Post reply on HN