Volunteering is a common concept in many communities. We have volunteer fire fighters, volunteer paramedics, volunteer librarians, volunteer social worker, volunteer ...
Some of these in fields, and sometimes even in close alignment to payed people.
In the context of SO there is a community producing Creative Commons (while there was recently a license change making the company less trustworthy) contents to help people and some people love helping others and the assumption is that the value this brings to all is bigger than the value for the company. Until recently the combination seemed to work. The company runs the platform to advertise their job boards and enterprise versions of SO and the community manages the content. But recently changes seem to be frustrating.
For comparison see also Wikipedia volunteers vs. Wikipedia foundation, Mozilla foundation&corp vs. Contributors, and even people happily submitting pull requests to Microsoft products on GitHub.
SE does not profit from its community websites (eg the ones we all read) aside from a vague "getting traffic to its enterprise product" which is probably not worth what they spend on hosting.
I don’t see how it’s my problem that their business model isn’t profitable. The board & C-suite still draw a salary, and the company value is built on unpaid labour.
And now we are contributing for free to Y Combinator!
(True - there's not much direct revenue from this comment I'm typing here, but this is Hacker News, the place where the imorotantninfirmationnos and YC is in the center of it, don't you see how cool they are?)
look, I get that you're not used to being called out on being hopelessly wrong. rephrasing the statement to be an empty tautology so you can be right is a waste of both of our times and only serves to protect your ego
Wikipedia and Mozilla were at one time mainly Non-Profits that people volunteered at for the same reason people volunteer at other non-profits, to benefit wider society
Both are turning more and more to be more profit-seeking, (Mozilla more than Wikipedia ) and it is tarnishing their reputations
SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".
Generally speaking, I do not believe For-Profit business should be allowed to seek Volunteers for their labor, this includes SE, Reddit, etc
If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business
> SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".
> If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business
Considering executive compensation at many non-profits, I don't think non-profit status alone is a good indicator of anything.
As for SO / SE, I didn't volunteer time and effort in light of their non-profit status, I volunteered in light of their mission. It was about putting in some amount of effort to make the world a better place. I couldn't care less if they made money off of it, just like I don't care if someone takes my open-source work and manages to make a business of it.
Or, people need to stop volunteering their time for free to commercial enterprises and then thinking that time investment gives them rights regarding the management of the enterprise.
Of course it doesn't grant them explicit rights, but it for sure grants implicit leverage if said commercial enterprise depends on these voluntary contributions. "Alienate your contributors, lose the basis of your business" doesn't sound very sustainable.
If you pay people for their labor then you can set terms in exchange for pay. It validates and reinforces the agreement. I’m being attached here for saying people should be paid for work.
Not having to accept terms is the point, or one of the major points, though. As an employee, you're beholden to the company, whereas as a volunteer, you don't owe them anything.
That doesn't mean exploitation isn't real and shouldn't be combated, but I think there's also a grey area that should be acknowledged.
By the way, what do you think of open source, and companies which use it?
My intent was not to attack you but rather the idea that contributing to internet forums somehow gives you any ownership rights to the forum.
For example, I don't know if HN makes money off this forum, but all of us commenters are contributing content that furthers the site's goals (hopefully). Yes, dang and sctb are paid to moderate this forum, but if there were no comments, there would be nothing to moderate.
Does that mean that by virtue of participating here for seven years I somehow have some right to tell them how to run their business? No, because there's no employment agreement. And even if there were any agreement, I doubt we would have the ability to do anything about some sudden change in direction from the C suite.
The realization that mere comments or the moderation of them on an internet forum create uncompensated content that someone else may profit from is apparently not as plain as I thought it was.
