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Comment by zonidjan | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe don't volunteer there. StackExchange isn't even a charity, it's a private for-profit company.

This. Stop giving your time for the profit of people who don't care about you. You want to help the community? You want to be respected? Great! Find some like-minded people, start a new site, maybe even make it a non-profit or at least democratic. But above all, stop making rich people richer off your labor

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Yeah, it kills me when they say they are "people who have invested a lot in the network". Sorry, kids, but investors get stock. Employees get paid. And only non-profits have volunteers.

Stack Exchange describes themselves as a "a hyper-growth enterprise software company" [1]. I have no idea why anybody's giving them free labor. I'll happily volunteer for Wikipedia. But until somebody sets up a non-profit Q&A site, there's no way I'm contributing content.

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf...

They invested time and effort with the goal (presumably) of building/maintaining the community. You may think that is a poor decision on their part; but it is still an investment, and they are still volunteers.

It's not investment when other people get the returns. At best, it's a gift. At worst, it's a con. I also question that there is a "the community" in a meaningful sense of that term.

> Sorry, kids, but investors get stock.

Ironic phrasing, considering that we parents invest insane amounts of time and money into kids. And no, we don't get stock. Not even a percentage of future earnings.

Yet we keep investing more and more anyway. Not all returns are financial.

If you really can't tell the difference between the child you chose to have and a for-profit, investor-backed corporation seeking hyper-growth, I'm not sure if I can help you.

Yes, not all returns are financial. But companies exploiting others' generosity to get rich is a cuckoo's-egg strategy.

Aside from a few of the biggest Stack Exchange sites (including Stack Overflow) most of the 170 sites don't have ads and don't make profit. The only profit is very indirect, demonstrating that Stack Overflow the company can run sites like these, something which is now in doubt. (Disclosure: I'm a mod on one of the small SE sites and helped author the letter.)

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