The Internet Relies on People Working for Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#61

Post by falcolas » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

drei109 wrote: post #10

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

In my experience with moderators on Reddit, is that they are power driven adults who still act like teens.

The sad thing about aging - the body and mind (metaphysical mind, not the brain itself) don't necessarily age at the same rate.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#62

Post by viburnum » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

It's completely normal and human to want to be productive and contribute. About half of the work that gets done is paid work. The rest, parenting, diy, housework, cooking, volunteering, creative work, is not. This work is done out of a spirit of generosity and/or reciprocity. To exploit that work without reciprocity undermines society. To be generous to billionaires is insanity. Markets are great and all (competition can be fun, after all) but they aren't in accord with every aspect of human nature. Life is better for people when they feel like they express their creative and generous aspect without being a sucker.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#63

Post by samirillian » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

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…

> Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do.

This is such a red herring. There are plenty of ways we can look at this situation that don't involve unreserved consent.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#64

Post by irrational » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #57

cheez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see it as emblematic of weak people who don't want to ever be exposed to anything disagreeable. Why can't the whole world be sunshine and unicorns?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#65

Post by jerf » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #57

cheez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is, I think, a fairly sharp line between you deciding you don't want to interact with someone in some particular forum, and someone else deciding you can't interact with someone.

That line is not the line between "good" and "bad", necessarily. I'm just saying it's a relevant difference that shouldn't be blurred away.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#66

Post by bilbo0s » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #48

jjohansson wrote: post #42

Perhaps most egregious are companies who profiteer from open source, without contributing back. Amazon comes to mind.

So does Apple.

Pretty much every startup and company in our industry.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#67

Post by irrational » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #5

A rational actor never works for "free", they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies. I think it's brilliant that we can use these carrots to get good work out of people that can be shared on the internet. All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.

The vast majority of people I meet, including myself, are highly irrational. Ironically, that is not where my user name comes from ;-)

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#68

Post by djsumdog » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

There aren't a lot of totally free, open-source, end user products. In the 90s FOSS devs though one day GiMP would surpass Photoshop, we'd see Linux on at least 8% ~ 10% of laptops at coffee shops, Inkscape would be better than Illustrator, etc.

Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you build things to interact with the big commercial players.

Yes there is still a lot of FOSS that's small, 1 ~ 5 people maintainers that's volunteer. But there is a considerable about that's corporate backed. We're a far cry from the FOSS hope of the 90s. I wrote about this a few years back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#69

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

helpPeople wrote: post #39

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…

I'm in a similar situation. Started a website for fun, maybe I'll sell books. Then my website got popular and people want more content faster. I have a day job, so I can't work full time unless I'm paid similar. I'm unsure what to do next. My free website can be monatized with the goal of quitting my job. Or users can get my hobby for free. It seems no one is happy except me. The only benefit, my popularity will like…

> It seems no one is happy except me.

Well, keep what makes you happy, and rest assured that happy people usually do not voice their happiness, so the entirely one-sided voices you are hearing carry almost no real information.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#70

Post by michaelt » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

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.

It's possible 99% of PR/marketing firms don't have armies of Reddit/Twitter bot accounts, while at the same time the 1% that do make up a big power base on Reddit.

There are plenty of companies doing things like SEO and suchlike that build up networks of websites/content farms, and bots to comment on blogs and suchlike. Not much of a jump from bots commenting links on blogs to bots commenting more subtle messages on Reddit.