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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of deep investigation of a super specific issue I always enjoy reading. This is what I thought the internet would be, 20 years ago.

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It's a sign of a "cognitive surplus", because we have more educated people now than we have jobs for them to do. Also it's a sign of how these sites get people to work for them for free, and concentrate huge amounts of other people's work for their own benefit. This poster got nothing for all that work, but SE still gets advertising revenue driven by interest in the content.

another example that there is not enough work to go around is that if you go into any downtown anywhere in the world at 7 pm to 8 p.m. you will see people drinking beer in bars.

These same people could still be working, since there is no reason they shouldn't be in an office, factory, etc, for a full 14-hour workday. Clearly there is just not enough work to go around, which manifests itself as people sitting around drinking or going on fun Internet sleuthing that nobody would mistake for work.

(well, except that one guy.)

Children are the same way. All that time they spend playing could be spent in a factory making sneakers.

I don't know about your kids, but mine would make some shitty sneakers :-)

They'll be fine after a few days of training.

I'm not arguing from first principles here. Workforce participation is down. This is just a symptom. I'm not against having free time, but against companies who ask you to work for them for free. If people had the ability to make money with their time and effort, that guy would be more likely to be paid for his post.

So if HN added advertising to support the site, you would totally stop posting here, right?

Not unless I could find a place that would pay better for my posts.

SE provides a venue for these types of discussions, and in exchange does a small amount of advertising to make the venture profitable. How is that exploitative in any sense of the word? Do you have the same attitude towards social clubs that charge fees?

I don't go to SE for the "venue". I usually get there via a Google search, which means the only draw is the content. And hopefully Google would give me the same info if it were on any other site that paid their writers.

you don't go for the venue, but others do - the asker and the answerer who generated the content in the first place. You're just getting the benefit of their exchange due to SE's existence. I don't understand why you have an issue with SE hosting content in exchange for permission to advertise on it. I have to pay amazon/digitalocean to host my content - if it costs something for a host to provide it then they can either make the money back somehow or constantly lose money.

But the only thing SE has to offer is other people's content. And I don't have a problem with them making money, but with not sharing any with the people who are the reason the site gets money. They're not even middlemen who take a cut, they're getting 100% of the revenue.

but that implies that content is the only valuable thing, and distribution and hosting are negligible. If anything, it's the other way around - content is abundant and quality distribution is the hard problem. That's the reason the marketing industry is one of the largest around.

If people want to try to make money from their Q&As they can post them on their own site and either charge for access or advertise, but then they'll need to market it to get revenue so then they become like an SE but only for their own content and they'll make very little money anyway. That's basically the position of a professional blogger and very few of those make any real money.

Right, that's pretty much my whole point. Money gets concentrated. Employment is low.

yeah - people who provide services become successful. It's a pretty good system as long as we can keep the less successful people out of poverty. Equality of outcome is possibly the worst idea in history.

But we're not keeping them out of poverty. Facebook has a homeless encampment directly across the street. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/facebook-cam... Are you in favor of any kind of equality?

of course - equality under the law. People like to act like equality of outcome is a natural extension from legal equality but it simply isn't.

I know we don't keep people out of poverty right now, and that's something that needs to be fixed. But if you think equality of outcome (i.e. eliminating economic disparity) is the solution to that then you may want to read up on the USSR and Maoist China. Capitalism is pretty good at raising the living standard of the whole population, even if it does end up creating billionaires at the same time.

I'm in favor of democracy. I think the government should represent each person's interests equally no matter how rich they are. I think the only reason we didn't have a violent worker's revolution in America is that we were able to pass the socialist platform democratically.

welfare existed long before socialism and is pretty distinct. Systems of welfare were passed democratically, as they should be. The main reason the West in general didn't have any worker's revolutions (excluding Spain) is that the capitalism+welfare situation we have actually works really well.

The implicit assumption here is the only reason people don't spend 100% of their time working is the inability to find an employer.

No, I'm saying people are less likely to work for free when they can find work that pays instead. Seeing lots of people do work for free is a symptom that lots of people are underemployed.

Only because you've classified every activity as "work". People have hobbies where they do things purely for entertainment.

People write all sorts of nonsense for newspapers and get paid for it. Just because you personally don't value some labour doesn't mean it's not valuable labour.

> if go into any downtown anywhere in the world at 7 pm to 8 p.m. you will see people drinking beer in bars.

Those people are still working, they just don't know it

Oh please. It's just someone enjoying a challenge and hunting down something for gratification. Let's not make it out to be more than it is. There have always been people that go above and beyond for intellectual gratification and out of nothing more than curiosity.

There have always been people willing to do things like this for "no good reason" and for nothing in return since time immemorial. I don't want to live in a world devoid of such awesomeness. I've done it myself and hope to continue to do so, even being cognizant as I am that someone may benefit from my toils without my making a buck. If I spend a month developing an open source library that does something novel and release it under a liberal license (MIT, BSD) on GitHub, am I not doing the same sort of thing every day?

This SE answer is awesome and it's helpful and insightful; but it isn't an example of capitalism at work and poor people being fleeced out of their time and money so the big guy can make a buck.

Respect to the poster. That was some legit research.

I agree. The stack exchange is a place I whitelist in my adblocker. They seem to take ads and ad quality seriously, they provided very useful and interesting content, and they employ a pretty excellent team. I don't see the problem. It seems like what you'd hope for from the situation.

> This poster got nothing for all that work

Not all utility is money. The poster voluntarily spent time and energy creating that response, and voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial. So the poster got something for all that work, but it wasn't money.

And then there's a community discussing the work and it's motivations. Maybe people is driven more by curiosity than money.

This poster got nothing for all that work

What's your basis for this claim? I can see saying "this poster received no financial compensation for all this work" but that's a different claim. It seems to me that the poster must have received somethingp[1], or they would not have put the effort forth in the first place.

[1]: where "something" could be self-satisfaction, ego-boost, intellectual gratification, or any number of other non-financial rewards.

I think your line of thinking only implies the poster believed that he would receive a rewards, not that he did receive a reward (he may have regretted doing the work afterwards).

Isn't that a bit like saying that night clubs get their cooler / more attractive patrons to work for them for free, by attracting the wider masses?

Night clubs actually pay their DJs, bartenders, bouncers, etc. And they might comp more attractive patrons, which isn't quite the same as paying them but it's not nothing.

There are nightclubs in Vegas that pay attractive women to show up and spend some time on the dance floor.

> This poster got nothing for all that work

@sp332, you've submitted 693 items to HN, and you've made thousands of comments.

What did you get for all that work?

Well they're not paying me. Why?

The smaller stack exchanges are a really wonderful source of content I never thought I needed to know. I always check out the "hot network questions" side panel when I land on stack overflow and almost always find something interesting.

I always thought they were about "networking" as in IT so they'd really confuse me.

I always get sucked in to the addicting Hot Network Questions as well when I land on Stack Overflow, which is why I need to block the entire sidebar so that I can get some work done!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-hot-network-q...

I do this too! Firefox - uBlock's "Block Element" feature.

I also block the Hot Network Questions on Stack Exchange sites while at work – though not when using my home profile. As a Firefox user, I simply added the following lines to my `userContent.css`:

    @-moz-document
        domain("stackoverflow.com"),
        domain("superuser.com"),
        domain("serverfault.com"),
        domain("askubuntu.com"),
        domain("stackexchange.com")
    {
        #hot-network-questions {
            display: none;
        }
    }

It's a shame that the internet devolved into cat pictures, pervasive advertisements, and political shouting matches. On the other hand, there are still some great communities out there for great discussion. I consider HN to be one of them.

Perhaps unintuitively, the Something Awful forums are another relatively small, intelligent community.

I genuinely worry about the day the SA forums get shut down for whatever reason. I've been posting there since 2003 and it's my first stop on the 'daily internet check' ritual.

It didn't devolve - it expanded. There is still plenty of great content out there, it's just mixed with a lot of other content of varying quality.

Maybe "diluted" is a fitting word.

Not really, "dilution" implies that when the Internet grows to include another crappy site everything else in the "solution" is slightly crappier. If a new web site for cat pictures or political shouting matches opens up tomorrow, it does not affect the quality and usefulness of HN.

No, but I've seen plenty of good subreddits go bad after a flood of new users!

Exactly. I started skimming the article like I do most these days, scrolling to the punch line while collecting the gist. When I got to the part about the ball being a knock-off, I was struck with excitement because I knew I wanted to read this whole thing, word for word.

Almost as good as the story about the missing German family (http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...)!

What an interesting story! Thanks for sharing.

The way it's written, and the theme, remind me of: http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/page1.html

Isn't the internet just a reflection of humanity, at this point?

A Point. We seem to make a lot of cost-benefit analyses for every decision make instead of just doing something because it's good to do. We living in the age of matured internet seemed to be only interested in contents that could help us make a point (Read: ROI) during a discussion or debate unlike people earlier just wanted to know something with no reason. Hence triviality didn't come as a filter.

Pretty sure we had stuff like that in 1997!

I would love to see a deep investigation proving/disproving this point

Somewhat related: USENET's culture was destroyed as early at 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

pours one out for my homies

More seriously, I sometimes sorta miss USENET. However, my ISP actually still provisions it. It has been a while, but I have gone back to check it out. It's nothing like I remember, so I don't end up making it a point to check the groups regularly and I leave it alone for a few more years.

I've always loved this kind of stuff from Quora, for example:

‪https://www.quora.com/Suppose-I-just-stole-2-billion-dollars...

You were right!

I'm happy to report there is a website specifically for investigations like this:

http://nounsstarting.com

Oh internet, never change.

you should read some of /pol/'s analysis of the email leaks from last year: it was truly a wonder of crowd-sourced investigation. They even set up meta investigators (managers?) to help guide the anonymous users' investigations to make sure that all of the emails got read and categorized.

it was quite fun to be a part of, actually.

Once you strip out the racist and homophobic filler was it actually good analysis?

It was. Very professional, considering it was all anonymous. But there were high standards and major findings had to be verified before being disseminated.

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