131–140 of 251 posts
As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.
However it makes you an especially visible member of that community, especially to its worst elements. The constant hostility and eventually the harrassment made me step down.
Now I watch other moderators go through the same motions. People are absolutely vile to them, all over a tiny internet forum.
I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0]. If your motivation for doing open source is money, you're doing it wrong. You'll be much better off just getting a job (and GitHub stars can help with that!). We all know "build it and they will come" and "follow your passion and the money will follow" don't really work in the real world. You have to make something people…
Open-source can be a great selling point and a growth driver, but it won't replace all the other parts of running a business, such as marketing, sales and most importantly, a functioning, profitable business model
If you need some advice, feel free to e-mail me
I will take a look at your open-source project and tell you how it can be turned into a business
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Careful, if too many people start thinking like this reddit's entire business model built on free labor collapses.
Reddit mods largely aren’t doing it for nothing. They are doing it for social power and the ability to control the conversation for communities. Just think about what it means to be top mod of a cities subreddit. You can trivially just delete conversations you don’t like.
Moderators have powers, use power and are often not at liberty to reveal all what went into their decisions. Moderation on any scale is however a team effort and is then subject to scrutiny, discussion and review. Power tripping moderators will be removed by the team and in communities with a sole moderator who is on a power trip it will not thrive.
Classic mistake. FOSS is not about making money. In fact, it's antithetical to making money. Value extraction is the province of closed source/user hostile software, by nature.
A lot of people and companies are making money from Linux, including Linus Torvalds and many kernel hackers. Linux is GPL’d. I think it is hard to make the claim that making money is antithetical to FOSS.
As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.
Reddit Moderators, Forum Moderators, Chat Moderators, Blog Writers, Open Source Developers. The Internet is built on a lot of great people doing things for free. That doesn't have to be a bad thing if you are okay with it. But always make sure you feel good about what you are doing. If you get enjoyment or a sense of accomplishment (to quote EA) out of it then it's no worse than playing a video game or watching a tv…
As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.
Because of the power you have over other people? Why else would one become a moderator on an Internet forum.
Larger boards are like organization with promotions. Abuse of power won‘t earn you one. There are steering structures. Sometime one has to adjust what moderators do and have a discussion on what happened. Occasionally one has to kick a moderator out.
If you don‘t know why people help strangers then this may be worth a thing to investigate for you.
Instead, lifetime total of ~7 years is ~300 EUR, which includes donations to a NGO I forwarded, which account for most of it.
Most people will not pay voluntarily for something they can get for free. That’s just how it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the link: But it is MIT, can't I use it for free? Yes all projects are under MIT so the community backing honesty system can be ignored and Fody used for free. Do I need to be a Patron to contribute a Pull Request? Yes. Users must be a Patron to be a user of Fody. Contributing Pull Requests does not cancel this out. It may seem unfair to expect people both contribute PRs and also financially back this project. H…
If a package I personally used was developed like this, I'd fork it and ask my distro maintainers to point their repo at my fork with less bugs.
As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.
To me it felt like volunteering to keep the community running smoothly. However it makes you an especially visible member of that community, especially to its worst elements. The constant hostility and eventually the harrassment made me step down. Now I watch other moderators go through the same motions. People are absolutely vile to them, all over a tiny internet forum.
The problem with mods is that some of them behave badly enough and go on power trips banning people for their own enjoyment and making tantrums, thus giving a bad rep to the whole category, including those who are actually good people with sane principles.
I put up a donation link (before GitHub sponsors was introduced) on a repo that had 5k+ stars. Got just one recurring donation (about $1 a month). This wasn't a s/w tool though (tutorials for CLI text processing). Later, I switched to creating books out of such tutorials. I gave them away for free during launch weeks (but readers could still pay if they wish) and this model worked so well that selling programming ebo…