> I think it borders on exploitation there are a lot of young individuals with wonder-lust that see a name like Reddit and will put in significant hours just fo

> I think it borders on exploitation there are a lot of young individuals with wonder-lust that see a name like Reddit and will put in significant hours just for the possibility of maybe getting hired. First, it's not exploitation. It can't be. It could only be exploitation if reddit were somehow planning to benefit from their implementations--e.g., if it would actually deploy one in production. Second, I think you're making a false assumption that "young individual with wonder-lust" putting in "significant hours" on a task like this is time wasted. I've spent far more time writing IRC bots just for the fun of it, but was that time wasted? Of course not. I learned new skills, gained new knowledge, and was able to approach the real world of software development with the confidence of having actually implemented my own project end-to-end. Though I think the two projects differ substantially in their difficulty, either project would benefit implementor in itself even apart from any prospects of getting hired.