Sharecropping: A Sucker’s Game Then — and Now | Hacker News Reader

Sharecropping: A Sucker’s Game Then — and Now

mediaorchard.com

55 pointsgrey-area19 comments

> So the Freedmen were forced to be tenants of the white landowners — planting the cotton seed, tending the crop, being responsible for everything produced by their small patch of land. But after all the work was done, they had to hand over the proceeds of their labor to the landowners and receive just a “share” of the “crop” — usually no more than half.

Sounds like the VC model?

It's exactly the VC model, except that in the VC model you still keep your limbs and salary if the business fails. My understanding is that in traditional share cropping and in other things related to it (like music), the "freedmen" still bore "equity risk"

Not to mention that the system was propped up by organized violence and the corruption of the legal system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States). This isn't a bad post, but the sharecropper simile kinda stinks.

Also sounds like any typical employment. You put in labour, and get back some fraction of the proceeds of the combined labour of all employees.

It also sounds like modern-day agriculture share-cropping, which is usually seen as a good way to mitigate risk in poor years and allow the landowner share on the upside in a profitable year. It is kind of strange to see it presented in a negative light when it is generally regarded as a fairly good way to obtain workable acres today.

This is very insightful, but see:

"Then Facebook announced that for all your best efforts to drive organic engagement, the reality is that only about 15 percent of your content would actually be visible to those people who had specifically requested (through “liking” you) to see your updates."

From the perception of someone saying they "like" something, that (in the origins of Facebook) was exactly that, and not a way to connect to a post stream

So what FB is doing there is preventing a single (tenant) entity from ruining the experience, and this is laudable.

FB don't want to die a death by a thousand cuts (or cat pictures, or 'reshare if you want Jesus in your life', etc, etc)

So if they are showing it by relevance this is important.

Of course the opposite happens as well, like in G+, that is so feud like, only the most popular content ends up there, so you may have the long tail, the most popular content and a gaping hole in the middle

Exactly.

If the first argument for Facebook being evil you think of is "They filter marketing messages I hoped to be able to bombard users with at no cost, irrespective of whether they actually showed any interest beyond once clicking a like button" you're probably worse than them...

If you didn't want to actually see the updates from a page you liked it was (is?) simple enough to mute it in your newsfeed. It's not different than emails from a website where you bought something. If the emails are occasional and even relevant, you'll probably let them be. If they spam you every 3rd day, you'll unsubscribe. If anything, rate limiting the updates from pages only encourages them to post more often, in hopes of getting through to more people.

Or company won't spend as much as they used to get those "likes". Do pizza companies still give out free pizza to get users to become a fan of them?

> So what FB is doing there is preventing a single (tenant) entity from ruining the experience, and this is laudable.

the user has been in charge from the start, they can remove it from their stream or simply 'unlike' or unsubscribe

what fb did is nothing more than a cash-grab and it will come back to haunt them

...or he can stop using fb, loss for fb

It's not a matter of simply "unliking" the page, sure, I've done that to a couple of annoying pages, but fb is interested in its product as a whole.

Also, I haven't seen content being hidden in most pages (you can always check the page and all the content is there), of course, the abusers have been 'unliked' by me already (but this is not what most people do)

App stores seem like an even bigger 'sharecropper'. Giving 30% for what?

The biggest point is advertisement - or was. Now that the app stores are saturated, you absolutely need to market your app independently. Its as if you have a website that has been given to you by apple/google and they allow you to make money off of it if you pay them annually and cut them in for 30% of revenue.

I think you're paying 30% for someone else to handle all the payment processing and delivery crud that you'd otherwise have to handle yourself. That stuff isn't necessarily easy or cheap especially when you get fraud + chargebacks involved.

So I do certainly think Apple and the other app stores are doing something for their money.

If blurb.com can make a profit selling your ebooks and keeping only 20%, I'm pretty sure that we're being overcharged at least 10%.

http://www.blurb.com/sell-your-book

"Earn money when people buy your book: you keep 100% of your markup for a print book or PDF, or 80% of the price you set for an ebook"

That's exactly what it is. An exchange of services for money, hedged. If that's a bad deal, feel free to sell on an alternative app store (Android) or convince your users to jailvrrak (iOS)

I guess it needed to be said, and was said very well here. But it always seemed so clear to me - when I see a business trying to promote itself by advertising its Facebook page, the mistake is so glaringly obvious. You're not promoting your business, you're promoting Facebook. Get your own website.

The problem that we all face, especially when we're new is that of discovery. Until you reach a certain level of notoreity online, creating your own little sandbox doesn't make sense. I could create a little programming blog, host it myself and revel in the twelve hits per day, or start a coderwall account and start showing up in targeted searches right away. Is Coderwall taking advantage of me in order to sell job listings? No, there's an equal trade of exposure - at least to start.

The owner of a website can set whatever policies they please. But the users can vote with their feet. They can always move to other places with a set of more agreeable rules. Give it a couple of more years, you will see average joe will be able to manage their own websites, and they can host their pictures and writings on their own website, and grant access and set all sorts of privacy levels with their lists of friends of different levels. They will not need to join any social network. And they will have their full control of their "40 acres". Until then, they have to subject themselves to the restrictions of the site owner.

Someone will make a tool to make managing user's own digital asset and content so easy as to disrupt the current social network business model. We already see the trend with all the "cloud computing" thing...

I started a free classifieds website ( http://www.houseofnothing.com ) out of similar frustration, and with similar goal that I will place as little as possible restrictions on the content a user can post. I encourage my users to be tolerant and open-minded, and respect the freedom of expression of others. I even had the thought of placing it under public control. But I am not sure how that will work.

http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html

http://futureoftheinternet.org

http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Future-of-Reputation/...

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