10 ms·

How do you expect them to be paid for their labor?

mikrl 3y ago
Voting with your wallet also applies to the supply side. Either paywall it to keep me out, or just don’t do the labour I won’t pay for ;)
- phailhaus 3y ago
  Yes, but everyone knows that this model often doesn't work, because most people won't pay. So they turn to ads. And then HN goes wild with indignation for the audacity to want to be compensated enough to keep doing it.
Ekaros 3y ago
On old internet no one was getting paid. It was a hobbyist community. People doing things because they wanted to and enjoyed it.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  The halcyon days of when you just made a website because you wanted to, not because you wanted to be a trillionaire while eroding the foundations of our society just a little bit more.
- phailhaus 3y ago
  Exactly. You can still do that, but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower. EDIT: Far lower on average, of course. Please don't fixate on pedantry. The point is self-evident and still stands. Quality and quantity is correlated with the amount of time you can spend on it.
  - mjr00 3y ago
    Quantity maybe, quality? Doubtful. A lot of hobby projects end up being way better than corporate stuff because they're made with passion instead of by cynical grifters trying to squeeze every cent of ad revenue out of users. Compare something like the nearly entirely ad-free UESP Wiki[0] to the ad-laden dogshit Elder Scrolls Fandom[1], which would be even worse had it not just scraped info from the UESP Wiki. One is a labor of love, the other is a labor of SEO specialists monetizing your eyeballs the best they can, and it shows. [0] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
    - phailhaus 3y ago
      It's really not debatable, because you're still allowed to make hobbyist projects today. Nobody is stopping you! The nature of the internet today is a superset of the old internet.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > quantity and quality is far lower. Hard disagree with this conclusion. Doing something full time does not mean that it will be high quality nor high quantity. Nor does not doing something full time mean that someone will not produce high quality in high quanity. Lots of great things are the product of people doing things in their free time.
    - fasterik 3y ago
      Hard disagree with your hard disagree. Any skill benefits from dedicating yourself to it full time. Yes, there are talented amateurs, but they're on the tail of the distribution. There is a selection bias because you don't tend to see all the mediocre work produced by untalented amateurs. Who is likely to be the better piano player, the accountant practicing 5 hours a week, or the concert pianist practicing 30 hours a week?
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        Keep in mind we're talking about the Internet. It's very easy to find the tail of the distribution on the Internet.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    The quality of the old Internet was higher on average. There is a lot of awesome content today, but they are hard to find amid an ocean of SEO, clickbait, social media and other random garbage content. The old Internet was a collection of passion projects, so you saw a lot of quality information exactly because people weren't being paid to produce it - they simply loved to do it.
  - jonathanlb 3y ago
    > but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower. This is totally a market-driven perspective, expecting quantity and quality linked to full-time work. Not everyone aims to monetize or dedicate themselves full-time to their online interests. Pursuits can be purely for enjoyment. It's okay if they suck sometimes. Not everything must cater to consumer or market demands, though that approach is valid too.
    - phailhaus 3y ago
      And that's literally still allowed today.
- fasterik 3y ago
  On the one hand, I agree there was a different vibe on the internet 20-30 years ago. It's what I grew up with and I'm nostalgic for that period. On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always had a commercial side. The only reason the internet became accessible to people outside government and academia in the early 90s was because commercial ISPs came onto the scene. The web became a lot more useful when for-profit companies like Google started indexing it. The computers we used to access the internet were only affordable because of decades of Moore's law driven by the semiconductor, home computing, and video games industries. I don't think the thing we're nostalgic for could have existed without the profit motive. We also shouldn't take for granted the amount of creativity enabled by modern platforms. We might be nostalgic for hobbyists making their own websites and chatting on IRC. But today we have orders of magnitude more hobbyists creating videos on YouTube and collaborating on Discord. Platforms like Patreon make it possible for people to turn their hobby into a career by connecting directly with their audience. Every aspiring game developer can make a video game in Unity and publish it on Steam. I can choose any topic I want to learn about and watch free lectures from experts at MIT and Stanford, or find high quality videos made by the most interested and dedicated amateurs. None of this existed 20 years ago.
  - 127361 3y ago
    And the next big thing to look forward to is local AI. With both the models and the hardware getting better and better, that's the next big thing. And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies being able to monitor your every move. So you could say it's way better even than the old Internet.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      > And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies Don't get too complacent. LE agencies already know this and all of that can still be surveilled, just not through passive intercept. This is actually the epoch I trust the least. We've had decades to refine spyware and condition people to install random binary blobs to do most anything. Auto-update and new ownership break provenance. Netherlands recently made it legal for police to hack anyone given probable cause. AI isn't safe or private unless it's air-gapped. I suggest you start figuring that one out while you still have time.
- gosub100 3y ago
  I remember when e-commerce first started and people were (rightfully) concerned, and sometimes outright terrified about "giving your CC number out online :o "
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
j4yav 3y ago
This is going to blow your mind but people used to make stuff and share it on the internet for fun not to get rich
- phailhaus 3y ago
  Yes, and it's still possible today. But if you want someone to do it full-time, like the people running Vice and producing their content, they need to be paid.
  - j4yav 3y ago
    Is that really true though? Anything like the old passion sites would be lost to SEO amongst the deluge of garbage content, thanks to the sheer volume of people at least trying to use the internet to get rich. The quality on average is certainly garbage level, it's like looking for a diamond in the Great Pacific garbage patch. So maybe it's technically true anyone can make a diamond today, without the profit motive, it's just that nobody will ever see it amongst all the average shit tier stuff you find everywhere you look. And that's literally the "something worse" that has replaced the old internet.
bastardoperator 3y ago
I think people are saying they wouldn't pay for this labor, and because of that, it's riddled with ads.
glimshe 3y ago
Why all labor needs to be paid through currency? Whenever I express my opinion to my friends, I'm in theory "doing labor" but with no expectation of getting cash out of it; instead, I'm getting paid by the satisfaction of hearing my friends' opinions on my opinions, and getting new information. Or perhaps simply changing the world a little for the better if my opinion can influence others to do good things. The old Internet was about that, the new Internet is about associating a microtransaction with every single piece of content.
- phailhaus 3y ago
  The new internet is about funding people enough to be able to produce content full-time. Nobody is stopping you from producing stuff for free, but you can't live off of it.

Voting with your wallet also applies to the supply side. Either paywall it to keep me out, or just don’t do the labour I won’t pay for ;)

phailhaus 3y ago
Yes, but everyone knows that this model often doesn't work, because most people won't pay. So they turn to ads. And then HN goes wild with indignation for the audacity to want to be compensated enough to keep doing it.

Ekaros 3y ago

On old internet no one was getting paid. It was a hobbyist community. People doing things because they wanted to and enjoyed it.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
The halcyon days of when you just made a website because you wanted to, not because you wanted to be a trillionaire while eroding the foundations of our society just a little bit more.
phailhaus 3y ago
Exactly. You can still do that, but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower. EDIT: Far lower on average, of course. Please don't fixate on pedantry. The point is self-evident and still stands. Quality and quantity is correlated with the amount of time you can spend on it.
- mjr00 3y ago
  Quantity maybe, quality? Doubtful. A lot of hobby projects end up being way better than corporate stuff because they're made with passion instead of by cynical grifters trying to squeeze every cent of ad revenue out of users. Compare something like the nearly entirely ad-free UESP Wiki[0] to the ad-laden dogshit Elder Scrolls Fandom[1], which would be even worse had it not just scraped info from the UESP Wiki. One is a labor of love, the other is a labor of SEO specialists monetizing your eyeballs the best they can, and it shows. [0] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
  - phailhaus 3y ago
    It's really not debatable, because you're still allowed to make hobbyist projects today. Nobody is stopping you! The nature of the internet today is a superset of the old internet.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > quantity and quality is far lower. Hard disagree with this conclusion. Doing something full time does not mean that it will be high quality nor high quantity. Nor does not doing something full time mean that someone will not produce high quality in high quanity. Lots of great things are the product of people doing things in their free time.
  - fasterik 3y ago
    Hard disagree with your hard disagree. Any skill benefits from dedicating yourself to it full time. Yes, there are talented amateurs, but they're on the tail of the distribution. There is a selection bias because you don't tend to see all the mediocre work produced by untalented amateurs. Who is likely to be the better piano player, the accountant practicing 5 hours a week, or the concert pianist practicing 30 hours a week?
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      Keep in mind we're talking about the Internet. It's very easy to find the tail of the distribution on the Internet.
- glimshe 3y ago
  The quality of the old Internet was higher on average. There is a lot of awesome content today, but they are hard to find amid an ocean of SEO, clickbait, social media and other random garbage content. The old Internet was a collection of passion projects, so you saw a lot of quality information exactly because people weren't being paid to produce it - they simply loved to do it.
- jonathanlb 3y ago
  > but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower. This is totally a market-driven perspective, expecting quantity and quality linked to full-time work. Not everyone aims to monetize or dedicate themselves full-time to their online interests. Pursuits can be purely for enjoyment. It's okay if they suck sometimes. Not everything must cater to consumer or market demands, though that approach is valid too.
  - phailhaus 3y ago
    And that's literally still allowed today.
fasterik 3y ago
On the one hand, I agree there was a different vibe on the internet 20-30 years ago. It's what I grew up with and I'm nostalgic for that period. On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always had a commercial side. The only reason the internet became accessible to people outside government and academia in the early 90s was because commercial ISPs came onto the scene. The web became a lot more useful when for-profit companies like Google started indexing it. The computers we used to access the internet were only affordable because of decades of Moore's law driven by the semiconductor, home computing, and video games industries. I don't think the thing we're nostalgic for could have existed without the profit motive. We also shouldn't take for granted the amount of creativity enabled by modern platforms. We might be nostalgic for hobbyists making their own websites and chatting on IRC. But today we have orders of magnitude more hobbyists creating videos on YouTube and collaborating on Discord. Platforms like Patreon make it possible for people to turn their hobby into a career by connecting directly with their audience. Every aspiring game developer can make a video game in Unity and publish it on Steam. I can choose any topic I want to learn about and watch free lectures from experts at MIT and Stanford, or find high quality videos made by the most interested and dedicated amateurs. None of this existed 20 years ago.
- 127361 3y ago
  And the next big thing to look forward to is local AI. With both the models and the hardware getting better and better, that's the next big thing. And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies being able to monitor your every move. So you could say it's way better even than the old Internet.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies Don't get too complacent. LE agencies already know this and all of that can still be surveilled, just not through passive intercept. This is actually the epoch I trust the least. We've had decades to refine spyware and condition people to install random binary blobs to do most anything. Auto-update and new ownership break provenance. Netherlands recently made it legal for police to hack anyone given probable cause. AI isn't safe or private unless it's air-gapped. I suggest you start figuring that one out while you still have time.
gosub100 3y ago
I remember when e-commerce first started and people were (rightfully) concerned, and sometimes outright terrified about "giving your CC number out online :o "

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

j4yav 3y ago

This is going to blow your mind but people used to make stuff and share it on the internet for fun not to get rich

phailhaus 3y ago
Yes, and it's still possible today. But if you want someone to do it full-time, like the people running Vice and producing their content, they need to be paid.
- j4yav 3y ago
  Is that really true though? Anything like the old passion sites would be lost to SEO amongst the deluge of garbage content, thanks to the sheer volume of people at least trying to use the internet to get rich. The quality on average is certainly garbage level, it's like looking for a diamond in the Great Pacific garbage patch. So maybe it's technically true anyone can make a diamond today, without the profit motive, it's just that nobody will ever see it amongst all the average shit tier stuff you find everywhere you look. And that's literally the "something worse" that has replaced the old internet.

bastardoperator 3y ago

I think people are saying they wouldn't pay for this labor, and because of that, it's riddled with ads.

glimshe 3y ago

Why all labor needs to be paid through currency? Whenever I express my opinion to my friends, I'm in theory "doing labor" but with no expectation of getting cash out of it; instead, I'm getting paid by the satisfaction of hearing my friends' opinions on my opinions, and getting new information. Or perhaps simply changing the world a little for the better if my opinion can influence others to do good things. The old Internet was about that, the new Internet is about associating a microtransaction with every single piece of content.

phailhaus 3y ago
The new internet is about funding people enough to be able to produce content full-time. Nobody is stopping you from producing stuff for free, but you can't live off of it.