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Comment by xenihn | Hacker News Reader

Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user?

Something Awful is the first example of such a business that comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent. Give your moderators power (however feeble that power may be), and give your users some sort of recognition (shoutouts, internet points, etc), and they'll produce and curate valuable, eye-drawing content for you for free.

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Basically all of social media is like this. You provide content to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever because you want people to see it. There is an edge case where you make money by getting famous, but usually people are just doing it for attention, same way they are for anything else. Why do people write answers on StackOverflow, Quora, whatever? They want people to read their answers and think they're smart.

Admittedly this is one explanation, another could be that people simple like helping others.

Some people like the puzzle/challenge aspect as well. Plus somebody asking something you know the answer to reinforces that your decision to retain that information has value.

I'm a librarian. We answer a lot of questions.

And sometimes you don't know the answer to the question before you start writing, but in the process you learn something new.

Answering questions I don't know is the BEST.

I wonder if there is a curated collection of stats somewhere on the lifecycle numbers on social media ventures?

It's sometimes described as 'digital sharecropping'[0]. Depending on your reason for participating you may get some economic benefit (perhaps as share or exposure for your business) while the platform both takes the bulk of any profits and completely controls the relationship.

Or you may get nothing, of course, other than some magic Internet points and a faintly tarnished sense of fun.

[0]: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634

> the platform both takes the bulk of any profits and completely controls the relationship [...] you may get nothing, of course, other than some magic Internet points and a faintly tarnished sense of fun

The magic points are a kind of worthless scrip.

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

Saint Peter don't you call me cuz I can't gooooo

I owe my code to Stack Overflooooow

Interesting find. It's really amazing how much has changed since then.

> Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation?

There are actually two industry terms for that.

The outward-facing (marketing) term: "User".

The industry-internal term: "Product (for sale)".

In some sense, the people doing "unpaid work" can be seen as trying to improve their own brand, name, or following. Very few of these influencers are able to monetize directly through this type of work though, unless it's through some sort of medium that does revenue sharing, like Youtube.

This would explain why most Quora answers start off like self-promotional puff pieces you'd find on LinkedIn, about how the answer you're about to read changed someones life.

Prodigy and CompuServe both had forums - back when I was in elementary school (early 90s/late 80s) I used to read and post to the comic book forums all the time. Both services easily predate Something Awful.

How were Prodigy and CompuServe making money off your posts?

You had to pay per minute you were connected, spend time posting and you pay them, others spend time reading and they pay you

“crowdserfing”

yea Web 2.0

I believe the insider jargon is “dumb fucks”.

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