3 ms·

I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors (which is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I mean, there'

I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors (which is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I mean, there's nothing inherently expensive about doing it, you just need a person with good sense, good ethics, and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter at hand. I somewhat doubt it. There are two problems: 1. Even with authors, you can only get certain types to do that. Many technology books are written by professionals with a day job and they often are more worried about some combination of contributing to the community, improving their resume, getting personal recognition, etc than they are about money. This is not true about professional authors. 2. To be effective, gatekeepers need to already have credibility and authority, so that is probably not the best of motivators for them. Also, someone needs to do the grunt work of fact checking and grammatical editing. Many people consider writing to be fun, but few consider fact checking fun and fewer still consider grammatical editing fun.

lsc 17y ago
Hm. See, well, at least in the technical publishing arena, this is the case 'cause we already get paid a lot more than all but the most famous authors. Your average writer of non-technical books is probably going to make very little money, and the bar to get a non-technical book published, I think, is higher than a technical book, in terms of writing skill. (a technical book, if technically correct, can editors and fact-checkers, from what I understand, make less than half what a competent computer janitor makes. Both these facts would point at people willing to do editing, fact checking and writing for less than what they could get doing other things. (assuming that the attributes needed to be a good editor or author are not a lot more common than the attributes required to be a SysAdmin.) Now, there is a lot of difference between doing something you like for not very much money, and doing it for free, so you might be correct that people won't do it unless there is at least some money, but I see evidence that people will do it for less money than they could get doing other things. as for the 'chicken and egg' part of the credibility issue, you are certainly correct if the same gateway/content producer relationship as we have now continues, but there are other models, like the model hacker news and other aggrigators use. If creators 'publish' content themselves to the 'net, then the 'gateways' just link to the content they find credible. Now, the question is "how does the aggrigator decide what links are worthy?" there are many ways to do this, but I suspect the best may end up being subject matter experts running small aggrigators that cover their own interests.

lsc 17y ago

Hm. See, well, at least in the technical publishing arena, this is the case 'cause we already get paid a lot more than all but the most famous authors. Your average writer of non-technical books is probably going to make very little money, and the bar to get a non-technical book published, I think, is higher than a technical book, in terms of writing skill. (a technical book, if technically correct, can editors and fact-checkers, from what I understand, make less than half what a competent computer janitor makes. Both these facts would point at people willing to do editing, fact checking and writing for less than what they could get doing other things. (assuming that the attributes needed to be a good editor or author are not a lot more common than the attributes required to be a SysAdmin.) Now, there is a lot of difference between doing something you like for not very much money, and doing it for free, so you might be correct that people won't do it unless there is at least some money, but I see evidence that people will do it for less money than they could get doing other things. as for the 'chicken and egg' part of the credibility issue, you are certainly correct if the same gateway/content producer relationship as we have now continues, but there are other models, like the model hacker news and other aggrigators use. If creators 'publish' content themselves to the 'net, then the 'gateways' just link to the content they find credible. Now, the question is "how does the aggrigator decide what links are worthy?" there are many ways to do this, but I suspect the best may end up being subject matter experts running small aggrigators that cover their own interests.