Coding Horror: Are You a Digital Sharecropper? | Hacker News Reader

Coding Horror: Are You a Digital Sharecropper?

codinghorror.com

38 pointsblazzerbg31 comments

The underlying theory of Web 2.0 is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Your video of your college roommate lighting his farts on fire would have basically zero value if you put it on your own personal web page (unless you happen to be Perez Hilton). Post it to Facebook, and suddenly you're an Internet celebrity, because millions of users are already coming to Facebook every day to see content just like yours, and because Facebook's architects made it perfect for viral distribution of information.

If you're interested in making money off of your content, there are sites out there that will help you try, from Shutterstock to Google Knol. I've tried many of them, and the pennies that I earn don't come close to covering the cost of my network connection, much less my computer. If you're going to call Facebook contributors sharecroppers, that's fine, but they are sharecroppers who spend all of their time arranging the seeds into a posterized mural of their pet cat, not planting them in the field and toiling to harvest the crops.

It's the classic content owner's mistake of overvaluing the content, and undervaluing the platform.

I'm not sure if the sharecropper analogy holds up. Sharecroppers essentially rent land, paying the landowner back with a share of the crops grown on it. Assuming the crop doesn't fail, both the cropper and the landowner make money.

On most web sites that aggregate user content, the content contributors make no money, and often the web site doesn't either (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook). These are more like online collaborative hobbies, where everyone involved is doing it just because they enjoy it and have some time to spare.

IIRC the rent was almost exactly equal to the value of the crops minus cost of living, so sharecroppers were left with no profit. Likewise in Web 2.0 there's usually enough money to keep the site running (sorry tr.im), but there's never enough money to pay any back to the users.

I think it's intentionally inflammatory, for teh clicks.

Atwood linkbaiting? That would never happen.

I think Atwood's point that many people are putting unpaid effort into sites that may benefit others is sound. I just don't think it's a calamity, since the time being put in is mostly spare time that the donors aren't expecting payment for.

Wikipedia makes money through fundraising.

It's sort of bizarre that he picks out Wikia as a negative example. The communities on Wikia can and do take their content somewhere else, including the entire edit history, attributions, and all. Original contributors retain copyright, and everything is clearly licensed under free licenses that permit the community to take it elsewhere (and commercially exploit it if they want; this is not a right that is reserved to Wikia). You can download the regularly-made content dumps easily; you don't need a special scraping tool. And finally, the software is open-source, so you can put a downloaded dump into a MediaWiki install in an afternoon.

How much of that can be said of your Stack Overflow contributions?

I think Coding Horror has already given whatever value it could. It's time to move along, perhaps.

Yeah, it seems these days that Jeff Atwood is a has-been who keeps rehashing the same old points that he made on his blog 5 years ago. I'm not sure why we give his blog posts such prominent attention on HN…

"Prominent attention" is just people voting with their mouse. If nobody upvoted, the posts would go away. So clearly some HN readers are getting something out of his posts.

clearly some HN readers are getting something out of his posts.

That's exactly my point—I don't understand what so many HN readers get out of the banal tripe that Jeff seems to be spewing in almost every post these days.

He's famous, and programmers love their celebrities.

I was just thinking he is still coming up with interesting ideas, even if it is just commentary on an article by someone else.

The original article: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc200...

> The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.

Good to know!

Wait, what does that even mean? Corporations can use Stack Overflow, for free, just like anyone else. Why hire a consultant or invest in training when you can just drop a question out into SO? I didn't realize SO's karma was that magic bill-paying kind. Attribution is a positive thing, okay, but let's not pretend that it somehow erases the 'sharecropping' aspect of the site.

Also, just for the record: comparing web 2.0 participation to sharecropping, complete with picture of black farmers, is completely idiotic and more than a bit offensive.

Just for the record, I'm black and I have used the sharecropping analogy for what happens when you decide to write applications for a proprietary platform like OS X, Windows, or iPhone.

Actually, I haven't made that direct comparison to iPhone, but anybody with a text editor can take my old, old article about Konfabulator and Panic and do a little search and replace for themselves.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...

I don't think the analogy to sharecropping itself is offensive, I think including the picture that makes it clear we're talking about the post-Civil-War, legalized slavery version of sharecropping is what crosses the line. Without that, I think it's merely stupid, because web 2.0 participation is completely voluntary and usually done for fun or reciprocity.

I also agree with your point, that the sharecropper analogy holds better for earning your living by developing on someone else's platform.

I think the post-Civil-War version of sharecropping was also "completely voluntary"; sharecroppers could, and did, leave for the cities. Due to institutionalized racism, they didn't have access to the kinds of government farm support that kept their landlords solvent enough to keep from having to sell them the land. (This is a problem that still exists in the US.)

Or maybe you mean "completely volunteer", in the sense that nobody is getting paid. But it seems to me that a lot of people receive something of value from their participation in these sites, even if it's not financial in nature.

I meant the first interpretation. If you think post-Civil-War sharecropping meets the standard of "completely voluntary", you need to do some reading. You can start here:

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3590

Thanks! It says:

"Though much has been made of the system of peonage that kept sharecroppers in perpetual debt, tying workers to the same plantation year after year, there is significant evidence that Georgia croppers moved rather fluidly from place to place and from one form of labor to another. Certainly the reality of life as a sharecropper was a factor in the out-migration of rural Georgians in the 1910s and after. The sociologist Arthur F. Raper found in his study of Macon and Greene counties that of those Georgians fleeing the rural part of the state in the 1920s, the greatest numbers came from the ranks of sharecroppers."

Frankly, it sounds like a system of unjustly exploiting ignorant poor people that was roughly on par with the one described in Chicago in "The Jungle" at the same time. But that's pretty much what I thought before I read your link, too.

Maybe you could describe what sense you think it fails to 'meet the standard of "completely voluntary"' in?

I like how you ignored the part about lying to illiterate people about their debt, that was awesome.

Some good points about contributing your time for free, but the comparison is a bit inflammatory. Sharecroppers had no real choice, lots of risk, and such an arrangement was their only income.

Most instances of investing your time in an online activity are not so vital to one's financial income.

Contributing to stack overflow helps other programmers, gives you a some exposure, and perhaps answers questions of your own. Founders of SO put up capital and energy to build and maintain the site, and don't claim ownership of user-contributed content (cc-wiki license), and get revenue from advertising.

I'm reminded of the trouble that LiveJournal has had balancing the interests of its users and investors. They have millions of users, but many of those users post on topics that are, ahem, not what mainstream deep-pocketed advertisers want their names next to, and the users get very cranky when the LJ administration acts against their interests.

The "digital sharecroppers" may not be working for money, but they are expecting something less tangible in return for their efforts, and the things they want are not always compatible with the site owners making money.

Let me know when I can trade in my Stack Overflow karma for cash.

If you're someone who has karma coming out of their ears from helping people, it's almost worth mentioning on a resume.

Having more official awards beyond medals for a certain tier of users might provide some value. It would have to be to be difficult to game, and provide proof of some personal quality (technical knowledge, helpfulness, etc.).

The best way to do this might be to have some subjectivity - (semi-)annual awards for the top X users. Of the users with high karma, judges could choose the most meritorious.

The high-karma users there seem to get their karma by spending their entire day not working. I don't know how this would look good on your resume. (Jon Skeet, for example; does that guy do any programming anymore, or does he just tell people who can't read the manual how to do addition in C#?)

Also, a lot of questions are of the form, "What's the most awesome word to describe how awesome programming is?". Before these were forced to be community wiki, people really racked up the reputation points on these.

I only answer questions there because if I don't, someone else will. And their answer will be wrong. (Like, "you can't access databases from Perl." WTF.)

Maybe it'd be better to just print one or two really good replies and bring them to the interview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

{a slightly tweaked quote from the article}

So if you spend a lot of time creating content on someone else's company [..] I think you should be asking yourself some tough questions:

What do you get out of the time and effort you've invested in this company? Personally? Professionally? Tangibly? Intangibly?

Is your content attributed to you, or is it part of a corporate pool?

What rights do you have for the content you've contributed?

Can your contributions be revoked, deleted, or permanently taken offline without your consent?

Can you download or archive your contributions?

Are you comfortable with the business model and goals of the company you're contributing to, and thus directly furthering?

Ultimately, you have to decide which is more important -- building your own brand, or building the brand of the company you're contributing to?

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