178 karma · joined December 1, 2010
The reason a community like WomenMake is valid and important while something like MenMake is not, is because women have and still do face systemic discrimination in society, and in the workplace (and especially tech workplaces). You referenced this yourself (Global Gender Gap Index) so I assume you’d agree with that.
So women have a much harder time breaking into and progressing in the tech community, either systemically or even more explicitly through direct discrimination or abuse. WomenMake provides a valuable place for women to help each other through these issues that are specific to them, support each other in general and try to improve this imbalance. Men do not face these issues (although of course race, ethnicity etc are also issues, so many men face discrimination, but not because they are men, for other reasons).
Once women face no structural societal discrimination in the workplace, then something like MenMake and WomenMake might be equally valid, but until then you are not correct to make this comparison. (And at current rates this won’t be true for a very very long time).
A great example is 1Password, when you type in the url of an account, it fetches the favicon and displays it when listing your accounts, making is very easy to quickly scroll and recognize what you want.
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I also find it interesting that the two examples you gave, Uber drivers and Amazon shelf stacking, are two that will certainly be fully automated in the next 5 - 10 years.
I watched my trash collection truck last week, it had just the driver, and a robotic arm that picked up each trash bin and emptied it. I was just thinking "and it's the driver next".
My startup, Huzza - http://huzza.io - is doing just that. It's an app that lets you tip any song or artist in the world from your phone. We like to call it pay-as-you-love, and we think it's the future of music.
In terms of getting the money to the artists, this is definitely an important and difficult part - but we're going to start slowly, do things that don't scale and work it out from there. Out of interest, how do you see pledges and donations as different from a user's perspective?
Thanks for the feedback!
1 - We're definitely focusing on transparency around tip statuses.
2 - Yes, agreed!
3 - Good idea!
4 - Great, thanks!
We plan to launch with only Bitcoins, and shortly thereafter add on credit card payments to go more mainstream.
Our mission is to enable anyone to tip any creator anywhere in the world - so educational content and others are definitely included in this! Music is just the starting point.