Third funding model: You pay with contributed labor value
Consider how amazon turk employs people to work on small problems for small payments.
Google maps engages users to answer questions and write reviews for places they have been, for free. What if instead, occasional contributions to updating the map was the price for using it?
What if more online resources worked on a torrent-ish model where those accessing it contribute to hosting it for others? Wouldn’t that be grand?
A small amount of non-expert labor is just not worth very much? Like, Amazon Turk pays famously poorly.
What if instead, occasional contributions to updating the map was the price for using it?
I could imagine a world in which that was part of using the map, but it’s hard to imagine one in which it is a substantial portion. There are so many monetary costs to running a mapping site that you need some form of money coming in.
What if more online resources worked on a torrent-ish model where those accessing it contribute to hosting it for others?
Bandwidth is generally a small portion of the cost of running an online service. For example, the budget of this site (LW) is so overwhelmingly engineering time that they mostly don’t worry about the cost of servers, let alone bandwidth.
I think the vast majority of my altruistic impact is through donations, I don’t think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset.
I agree, but I think what you are doing is a fairly noncentral example of “working in advertising”. You are helping to add good constraints on a probably-bad process.
I’m not working on adding constraints, I’m working on adapting advertising to constraints proposed by browsers (primarily Chrome). Perhaps this is the same, since if advertising could not be adapted to the constraints you might end up with weaker constraints, but I do want to clarify that I’m on the ads side not the browser side.
Third funding model: You pay with contributed labor value
Consider how amazon turk employs people to work on small problems for small payments.
Google maps engages users to answer questions and write reviews for places they have been, for free. What if instead, occasional contributions to updating the map was the price for using it?
What if more online resources worked on a torrent-ish model where those accessing it contribute to hosting it for others? Wouldn’t that be grand?
A small amount of non-expert labor is just not worth very much? Like, Amazon Turk pays famously poorly.
I could imagine a world in which that was part of using the map, but it’s hard to imagine one in which it is a substantial portion. There are so many monetary costs to running a mapping site that you need some form of money coming in.
Bandwidth is generally a small portion of the cost of running an online service. For example, the budget of this site (LW) is so overwhelmingly engineering time that they mostly don’t worry about the cost of servers, let alone bandwidth.
I agree, but I think what you are doing is a fairly noncentral example of “working in advertising”. You are helping to add good constraints on a probably-bad process.
I’m not working on adding constraints, I’m working on adapting advertising to constraints proposed by browsers (primarily Chrome). Perhaps this is the same, since if advertising could not be adapted to the constraints you might end up with weaker constraints, but I do want to clarify that I’m on the ads side not the browser side.