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The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

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Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#51

Post by jamiequint »

jen_h wrote: post #44
user_50123890 wrote: post #4

Not just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers

I think (mainstream) Reddit content is something completely different; more like big clumps of PR firms employed by corporations and lobbying groups bitbotting around with nation states, all fighting and agreeing with each other and trying to build false consensus. Source IP analysis there is probably pretty interesting.

Yeah, that's not even remotely true.

Have you ever worked with a PR firm or talked to folks that work at one. Have you ever worked at a large company, or talked to people who manage social media at one? They are very far from this level of coordination. Most can't even manage to deploy a properly measured ad campaign, much less some kind of op sec driven Reddit content campaign.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#52

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

wvenable wrote: post #29

I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…

> most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for

Then why does my employer pay me even for the small bugfixes I make to their code?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#53

Post by mankyd »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #52
wvenable wrote: post #29

I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…

> most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for Then why does my employer pay me even for the small bugfixes I make to their code?

Because you go on to fix more than one bug. And add features. etc.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#54

Post by benologist »

wvenable wrote: post #29

I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…

What corporations rely on is thousands of parallel endeavors surfacing the best ideas and educating and training programmers from which they will take, use, hire, profit, save, all for free.

The stuff they don't use and the years of learning how to invent successful stuff is every bit as important as the failures. The successes can only be built by salvaging good ideas and abandoning bad ideas from the failures and obsolete successes. You pretty much have to demonstrate how you continue learning on Github just to get an interview.

Vital projects are not ok financially and we're starting to find out when they get repurposed as malware, or go unsupported despite being a dependency for a double-digit percentage of the internet. Most of the world is default-excluded from creating brilliant programmers because their parents have zero hundreds of dollars, let alone thousands, to subsidize a Stallman, Gates or Torvalds for the rest of us.

We are subsidizing corporations and they are racing to see who can hoard the most hundreds of billions of dollars.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#55

Post by dashwav »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #52
wvenable wrote: post #29

I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…

> most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for Then why does my employer pay me even for the small bugfixes I make to their code?

Because their business model can't rely on the interest and free-time of others, so they are willing to pay you for your continued "interest" in their codebase. They aren't paying you for those bugfixes, rather for your ability to available to do those bugfixes immediately

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#57

Post by erikpukinskis »

cheez wrote: post #24
user_50123890 wrote: post #4

Not just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers

Edit: very interesting that this post is getting downvoted. I didn't even say anything controversial, just that banning people is bad. Exactly the danger we face online, which will eventually get into broader society. I got banned on a platform for saying a public figure was physically attractive to me. Prior to that, I had engaged in a perfectly factual discussion about certain statistics that were in favor of a par…

You can treat it like an “emblem of cancel culture” and if you’re right.

It’s also an emblem for “people doing things other people don’t like and getting ditched for it” but which emblem you choose to see is up to you.

That’s kind of the power and the weakness of emblems.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#58

Post by RustyBucket »

In my opinion, free software stops being free when you need people behind it do something you need. Once "as is" is not enough for you, you either fork or fix it, or pay creates to help you. And it's not that people want to make money of this, rather than cover their costs while solving your problem.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#59

Post by notduncansmith »

jamiequint wrote: post #51
jen_h wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (mainstream) Reddit content is something completely different; more like big clumps of PR firms employed by corporations and lobbying groups bitbotting around with nation states, all fighting and agreeing with each other and trying to build false consensus. Source IP analysis there is probably pretty interesting.

Yeah, that's not even remotely true. Have you ever worked with a PR firm or talked to folks that work at one. Have you ever worked at a large company, or talked to people who manage social media at one? They are very far from this level of coordination. Most can't even manage to deploy a properly measured ad campaign, much less some kind of op sec driven Reddit content campaign.

This. You don’t need to orchestrate mob-like behavior on Reddit, it’s already full of people who like mobbing. The most outside interference you need is (maybe) privately stoking a few radicals to action and letting them inspire the rest of the mob.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#60

Post by LomaxJunior »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #36

“The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions.” And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...

Global Standards can be included in that list, here is one example called Signalling System 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protoc...

Caller ID uses a protocol used by dial up modems, which means the telecoms hardware supporting it, is in effect, a dialup modem which makes life easier for security services to remotely access systems once they have updated the firmware on telecoms hardware, for a persistent backdoor.

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