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One could argue that it is exactly this financial incentive that causes all the mislabeled useless apps on the app stores.
by jascii 6y ago
One could argue that it is exactly this financial incentive that causes all the mislabeled useless apps on the app stores.
- viro 6y ago>financial incentive ? ... financial incentives is the motivation for most labor.
- anoncake 6y agoFinancial incentives redirect labour from useful to profitable activities.
- viro 6y agoYou mean labor is directed towards actions that produce more value than simply the labor put into them. Odd, its like you think that's a bad thing.
- anoncake 6y agoThat is literally the opposite of what I wrote.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI think this comes down to whether you agree that money == value, and that value == utility (i.e. that people will pay for things that they find useful)
- jascii 6y agoThat statement only holds if you only define "value" as financial gain. I would consider that a dangerous simplification.
- aidenn0 6y agoSince much of monetary value is related to scarcity, labor is directed to reduce scarcity, not to actions that produce social value. The pool of people who are capable of collecting garbage is non-scarce, so the price for labor is relatively small compared to the social value it produces. Advertising is so well rewarded because the attention of consumers is a very scarce resource, so companies put massive amounts of money into capturing some of that.
- cubano 6y agoyou cannot possibly be postulating that profitable activities can never be considered useful, are you?
- jascii 6y agoI do not see OP stating that "useful" and "profitable" are mutually exclusive. I think it is widely understood that there is "usefulness" that is not satisfied by profit driven organisations, that is why we have non-profits and public institutions.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoCall me cynical, but most non-profits seem to be more interested in paying salaries and fundraising than in the actual thing they're supposed to be "about". And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.
- jascii 6y agoFine, I'll call you cynical... ;P There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.
- wott 6y agoNote that he didn't say overpaying, just paying. It is true that in all organisations (including those associations), as time passes, professionalisation progresses, headcount raises, administrative and secondary tasks develop; and self-preservation, self-replication become a goal of its own. There is a whole range of people (I don't mean leaders or managers, but bottom/middle people) who make a career in all those non-profits, para-public and semi-public associations (all of them living mostly from subsidies), hoping from one to another. At least it goes like that in my country, it has developed a lot in the last 30 years.
- fouric 6y ago...and, since many (not all) profitable activities turn out to be useful, financial incentives still end up incentivizing useful activities. For instance: [IDE company] employees are incentivized to develop [IDE], I buy [IDE], [company] makes a profit, and the value that I get out of [IDE] means that their activities were useful. Good stuff.
- anoncake 6y agoSure. But others are entirely useless or even harmful. If you want people to implement dark patterns, tracking, advertising, or walled gardens, you have to pay them.
- jascii 6y agoResearch has actually indicated that the link between financial incentives and motivation to work is actually very small: https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv Thus widespread availability of "labor of love" open source software, and the relative crappiness of a lot of commercial software.
- bordercases 6y agoYou still hit solvency constraints at some point.
- reader_mode 6y agoMost OSS is funded by corporate and wouldn't exist without it
- jascii 6y agoCorporations do provide funds for some larger projects, that is however not anywhere near "most".
- greyhair 6y agoMoney has a huge affect, up to the point that your needs are met. Yes, if your needs are met, and you have time to pursue things you enjoy, you do that, but first, your needs must be met. If I didn't require an income to cover a family of five, I would be retired, and doing whatever it is that I love at any moment. But instead, I work for a living, for money, to meet our needs.
- rorykoehler 6y agoThat’s a byproduct of capitalism with insufficient safety nets.
- viro 6y ago-_- I just wanna point out the homeless rate in China is higher than the United States, and you still have to pay rent in China too. So it's not really a capitalism problem its a being alive problem.
- rorykoehler 6y agoWhat does China have to do with this?
- viro 6y ago@rorykoehler It's the most well known non capitalist society.
- rorykoehler 6y agoChina is a capitalist state in all but name.
- cheaprentalyeti 6y agoI'm beginning to think the whole "capitalist"/"communist" dialectic is meant to make people think there's a "capitalist" economic system or a "communist" economic system, whereas when the communists get control they make a "state capitalist" or "party capitalist" system that looks much like "capitalism" except it has a severely authoritarian political system (which everyone is told is a symptom of "capitalism.") In other words, "communism" is an authoritarian/dictatorial political system that masquerades as an economic system until it doesn't have to put up with any dissent, at which point it goes back to "capitalism." (State or Party or whatever. I think they call their version "with chinese characteristics" in the west.)
- 6y ago