Wanted: Free labor
The social web depends on content, tagging and utility created or improved by the good will of the people formerly known as the audience.
Where does good will end and greed take over? That depends on whether you’re a giver or taker. Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media is bothered by the free labor scheme he sees in a corporate blog post about new features just announced at Reddit, a commercial recommendation service and competitor to Digg owned by the Newhouse family’s Conde Nast magazine group, which, along with Vogue, Glamour and Bon Appetite magazines, publishes Wired (which publishes various blogs, among which we find a recent report on a crowdsourced Shins video shot by fans).
Reddit is looking for programmers to hire – and volunteer translators. Dan is bothered by that explicit distinction of value – cash for coders, air kisses for translators.
The finger-wagging at Reddit raises this question: Is there a qualitative, ethical or rational distinction between Reddit’s overt and explicit request for help with its product, the result of which could be a more valuable service for whoever uses it, and the implied request for help from the multitude of platforms and conversation-fueled media – like Facebook, MySpace, Kos, PerezHilton – or from the non-profit competitor to Digg and Reddit – NewsTrust? (Disclosure – I advise NewsTrust). They all depend on user-supplied content, comments, tags and filtering to create any semblance of a business model. Is asking for free translations going too far? But asking for recommendations, evaluations, comments, photos or trackbacks is ok?
Comment: A backlash against uncompensated contributions to commercial media would be fun sport to watch. Imagine if millions of people decided to dump Facebook next week, just for spite.
Analysis: The hype around crowdsourcing leads, at times, to visions of an open-source digital utopia in which everything online is produced for free by righteous individuals who donate their writing, editing, video, photo, coding, translation or whatever skills to virtuous, free, universally accessible, multi-lingual projects that are made better through the collective intelligence and will of said crowd. Professionals, meaning pay is involved, not necessarily skill, fade to black in this world. Though fantastical, the vision draws on the ancient sense of human connectedness. When people put their minds to it, anything is possible. Even Wikipedia. Indeed, the principle of shared, linked intelligence – through hyperlinks – is the bedrock of the web itself.
The ideal of digital collaboration – all for one and one for all – degrades to a more distopian tragedy when for-profit companies try to persuade unpaid contributors to expand, enhance and add value to their services. AOL built its chat-driven empire on the backs of volunteer chat moderators. But recruiting volunteers to work hard and well for your benefit isn’t easy. Commercial failures in volunteer-dependent hyper-local journalism come to mind – Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, for one, followed by Backfence. But so do commercial survivors, like delicious, MySpace and YouTube.
Forecast: The crowd will continue to create AND contribute – on its own terms, when and where it feels like it makes sense. Asking for help may at times appear selfish. The willingness to offer it reflects our yearning to link with and help each other.
