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I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

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Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#91

Post by Goronmon »

MattGaiser wrote: post #65
CarelessExpert wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems. A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no i…

It is not a matter of expertise, but a matter of setting priorities and valuing projects. I value MDN and Firefox. I am fine with every other aspect of Mozilla dying to save those two. How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.

How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.

Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like MDN that you can have such control over.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#92

Post by jermier »

aazaa wrote: post #86

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention W3Schools, because that's another model that has existed in parallel with, and may actually predate MDN. It has incredible Google juice, seems to be as resilient as an army of cockroaches, and is about as pretty. Still, it's another path this could take.

https://www.w3fools.com/

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#93

Post by Goronmon »

nwsm wrote: post #76
gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

>degenerate activism What's this in reference to, specifically?

Privacy concerns maybe?

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#94

Post by outime »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #79
outime wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP but I think you're reading between the lines. I feel OP though - I'd donate to a cause if my money doesn't go towards political alignments of any kind. I'm tired of NGOs or similar entities taking stances over stuff I didn't ask for. I just want them to do one thing, who gave you permission to use my donation to do a completely different thing, even if well intentioned?

> I'd donate to a cause if my money doesn't go towards political alignments of any kind. That's... well, naive, I guess? Every single NGO picks an issue, and that issue has a political angle to it. Not only do I think it's unreasonable to expect an NGO to be apolitical, I think it's flat out impossible. I would ask you: Do you really want NGOs to be apolitical? Or do you want them to share your political alignment, a…

There are NGOs that don't take public stances, you just have to look out for them (depends on your country as well I guess?). It's fine if you want to accept everyone is corrupt and will have hidden causes ("that's naive") but I don't and other people share this.

>Or do you want them to share your political alignment, and in that way be non-controversial?

Please stop these kind of assumptions - it just feels childish. I don't want political stances of any kind from an organization that's getting my money to make a specific thing better.

If I was to donate to MDN to make docs better, I don't want stances on far-right or far-left. I want my money to be used to produce better documentation, period.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#95

Post by th0ma5 »

outime wrote: post #60
th0ma5 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a kind of far right virtue signalling as far as I can tell. In my opinion, it is wild projection, but it seems to try to label any progressive ideal as regression.

I'm not OP but I think you're reading between the lines. I feel OP though - I'd donate to a cause if my money doesn't go towards political alignments of any kind. I'm tired of NGOs or similar entities taking stances over stuff I didn't ask for. I just want them to do one thing, who gave you permission to use my donation to do a completely different thing, even if well intentioned?

I think you make something of point. I feel a lot of conservative causes are a kind of degeneration of morals to an imaginary ideal supposedly of the past but that never really existed. I don't eat at Chik Fil A because of their degenerate views of people, for instance.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#96

Post by dmix »

> I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

Not surprising this is prevalent. This sort of ‘artificial positive feedback and positive thinking helps solves problems’ was rampant in schools.

Not to mention social media significantly selects for performative behaviour over tangible and measurable support.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#97

Post by wongarsu »

avolcano wrote: post #43
cannedslime wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the provider of a system or a standard also provides the documentation. Should my employer also pay to keep MSDN c# docs up to date? Or should that be the task of microsoft employees?

Microsoft gates plenty of training content behind Visual Studio subscriptions. Also, who is the "provider" of the web platform?

The provider of standards around the web is ostensibly the w3c, in reality whatwg or Google. Any of these three would be good candidates to run something like mdn. However that would probably make mdn more political and opinionated.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#98

Post by mekoka »

I think I understand the sentiment behind this post. But a few things give me pause:

> Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat?

I've seen some open-source authors/contributors successfully raise enough money, after they'd pledged to work on their project full-time. So the problem might not necessarily be to raise. But money has this uncanny ability to shift a project's focus. What happens when you raise more money than you actually need for the next 3 years (considering the scope of the project)? Will the project just mention that it doesn't need to raise more and just proceed to do what it's supposed to do? All the while spending and raising sensibly? Or will it find novel and creative ways to spend all this extra cash?

> The problem with expecting volunteers to do this sort of work is that they burn out.

Should we assume that once someone gets a salary they're somehow more resilient to burnout? I'd think that the burnout would be due to a volunteer biting much more than they should. So couldn't this also be an issue of work management and allocation?

> The passionate community has nothing to do with anything, unless they’re willing to pay. A profoundly unscientific poll indicates that only about two-thirds of my responding followers are willing to do so.

Is paying the only way to have helpful resources? I mean, we have the Wikipedia and StackExchange models that seem to provide decent value, even if not on par with MDN's standard. Would it be possible to have a model for MDN that meets somewhere in the middle, such as community contributed contents, moderated, reviewed, and edited by both community and full-time, knowledgeable, and paid staff? Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Linux kernel also follows something similar.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#99

Post by NationalPark »

nwsm wrote: post #76
gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

>degenerate activism What's this in reference to, specifically?

It's a culture war thing, it usually refers to LGBT or non-trad people/ideas/relationships. It's definitely pejorative.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#100

Post by marcinzm »

>But will we be well served by that in the long run?

Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.

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