This is “crowdsourcing” in the pejorative sense: a cloud of “suckers”, all arrows pointing to “you” in the middle.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others’ work, for no benefit to them.
You really, really can’t make a business except by proprietising contributions to a commons? The word for that is “parasite”. You really can’t?
Edit: The image I was thinking of, originally by Evan Prodromou (founder of WikiTravel) (here under CC-by 2.5 Canada):
The post the image is from is well worth reading, as are its comments, if you have a business plan that involves others doing the content creation unpaid.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others’ work, for no benefit to them.
While I’m in rough agreement with the general spirit of this comment, “no benefit” isn’t exactly right. If they use any of my material, then they’re taking my work, making it more accessible to people who might not have heard of it, and both spreading the ideas I wanted to be spread as well as making me personally more known. That’s work that benefits me.
That I wouldn’t approve of, but the possibility that some people misuse your work is the risk you take when setting it free. Besides, I’m pretty sure that they would be the ones who’d take the hit from that, once I had made clear that I had nothing to do with it and my work continued to be available for all.
It’d be a sucker business model if they had an automated program to compile books from posts and sell them on Amazon and they kept all the money.
This is them spending money to turn things into audio, then trying to sell enough audio files or subscriptions to pay the costs. In exchange, we get more exposure and people who wouldn’t hear our stuff otherwise can hear it. This seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable exchange as applied to my own posts, and I have no ‘ick’ reaction to money exchanging hands. Do you really have a mental image of some hard-working sweating LW poster, like me, living in poverty while Castify, dressed in a suit and dripping jewels, lounges around on my back? This is not a particularly lucrative engagement they’re entering, and I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Hmm … Castify doesn’t have any other content (and thus, no subscribers) yet. They’re literally brand new; the castify.co domain was registered last month. They don’t have an audience yet to which to expose or promote LW.
For me, this whole exercise pattern-matches much closer to “a tech startup promoting itself in a known technophilic community” than to “an effort seriously designed to maximize accessibility and promotion of the content” or a crowdsourcing ripoff of the sort David Gerard is describing. (The Wikitravel case is pretty icky, but it doesn’t resemble this case much at all.)
Not that an act can’t be both a promotion and an accessibility effort; and it’s pretty low-risk for LW, but on the other hand —
— how much do you usually charge for endorsements?
I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Ever? That’s pretty strong. Even conditioned on the existence of audiobooks of HPMOR — which cannot be commercially done?
The issue is that we have been called parasites, yet we haven’t done anything parasitic—in fact, short of asking for feedback, we haven’t done anything at all. We are asking for feedback because we don’t want to be parasitic. We understand there will some people who will never be comfortable with us using their stuff, some who wish to be compensated, some are happy to allow LessWrong [management] to decide what’s in their interest and some who are happy to freely allow us to use their material, perhaps subject to some restrictions.
What’s offensive is you using loaded terms to those who are actively trying to engage with you to maximize the utility for the community. If the end result is that there are no terms beneficial to both us and the community, so be it. The premise that we’d like to use your stuff with no benefit to you is incorrect. We would rather not pursue our business model than be parasites.
That was why we created this discussion in the first place.
Can we be less rude to people that aren’t used to our community’s discussion norms? Calling someone a parasite isn’t going to convince them of anything, and we want people like Rick to engage with us instead of just exchange some money and ignore the community.
The problem is that the arrangement posited is in fact odious, and that that aspect is important. If you have a word of equal accuracy that concisely communicates the problematic nature of the posited arrangement, I’m all ears.
In this case, the point would be just as strong with no word there instead. “Odious” is also a good word, come to think of it—not “you are odious” but “the arrangement is odious, because you seek to make money by other people’s uncompensated labor,” assume that’s in fact the business model.
It is trivially true that people may gain from their work being published, even in the absence of remuneration from the publisher. For example, it may contain product placement they are being paid for, it may gain fans they can later sell products to, or it may spread ideas they wish to see popularized. Indeed, in the absence of these “parasites”, many of these would willingly pay for their work to be published, and indeed some do.
In this case, the articles in question were not made to provide this site with ad revenue or because they were commissioned by some wealthy individual, they were made to be read, and to inform others of their contents regarding rationality. Anything that allows more people to access this material aids that goal, and as such this deal is mutually beneficial to both parties. Of course, it would be nice if someone was willing to pay, but frankly none of us are going to pay (or donate our time) to produce such material, and we are fortunate that there is someone who expects sufficient benefit from this.
This is “crowdsourcing” in the pejorative sense: a cloud of “suckers”, all arrows pointing to “you” in the middle.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others’ work, for no benefit to them.
You really, really can’t make a business except by proprietising contributions to a commons? The word for that is “parasite”. You really can’t?
Edit: The image I was thinking of, originally by Evan Prodromou (founder of WikiTravel) (here under CC-by 2.5 Canada):
The post the image is from is well worth reading, as are its comments, if you have a business plan that involves others doing the content creation unpaid.
While I’m in rough agreement with the general spirit of this comment, “no benefit” isn’t exactly right. If they use any of my material, then they’re taking my work, making it more accessible to people who might not have heard of it, and both spreading the ideas I wanted to be spread as well as making me personally more known. That’s work that benefits me.
What about when they start sending DMCA takedown notices with your name on them?
That I wouldn’t approve of, but the possibility that some people misuse your work is the risk you take when setting it free. Besides, I’m pretty sure that they would be the ones who’d take the hit from that, once I had made clear that I had nothing to do with it and my work continued to be available for all.
It’d be a sucker business model if they had an automated program to compile books from posts and sell them on Amazon and they kept all the money.
This is them spending money to turn things into audio, then trying to sell enough audio files or subscriptions to pay the costs. In exchange, we get more exposure and people who wouldn’t hear our stuff otherwise can hear it. This seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable exchange as applied to my own posts, and I have no ‘ick’ reaction to money exchanging hands. Do you really have a mental image of some hard-working sweating LW poster, like me, living in poverty while Castify, dressed in a suit and dripping jewels, lounges around on my back? This is not a particularly lucrative engagement they’re entering, and I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Hmm … Castify doesn’t have any other content (and thus, no subscribers) yet. They’re literally brand new; the castify.co domain was registered last month. They don’t have an audience yet to which to expose or promote LW.
For me, this whole exercise pattern-matches much closer to “a tech startup promoting itself in a known technophilic community” than to “an effort seriously designed to maximize accessibility and promotion of the content” or a crowdsourcing ripoff of the sort David Gerard is describing. (The Wikitravel case is pretty icky, but it doesn’t resemble this case much at all.)
Not that an act can’t be both a promotion and an accessibility effort; and it’s pretty low-risk for LW, but on the other hand —
— how much do you usually charge for endorsements?
Ever? That’s pretty strong. Even conditioned on the existence of audiobooks of HPMOR — which cannot be commercially done?
The issue is that we have been called parasites, yet we haven’t done anything parasitic—in fact, short of asking for feedback, we haven’t done anything at all. We are asking for feedback because we don’t want to be parasitic. We understand there will some people who will never be comfortable with us using their stuff, some who wish to be compensated, some are happy to allow LessWrong [management] to decide what’s in their interest and some who are happy to freely allow us to use their material, perhaps subject to some restrictions.
What’s offensive is you using loaded terms to those who are actively trying to engage with you to maximize the utility for the community. If the end result is that there are no terms beneficial to both us and the community, so be it. The premise that we’d like to use your stuff with no benefit to you is incorrect. We would rather not pursue our business model than be parasites.
That was why we created this discussion in the first place.
Can we be less rude to people that aren’t used to our community’s discussion norms? Calling someone a parasite isn’t going to convince them of anything, and we want people like Rick to engage with us instead of just exchange some money and ignore the community.
The problem is that the arrangement posited is in fact odious, and that that aspect is important. If you have a word of equal accuracy that concisely communicates the problematic nature of the posited arrangement, I’m all ears.
In this case, the point would be just as strong with no word there instead. “Odious” is also a good word, come to think of it—not “you are odious” but “the arrangement is odious, because you seek to make money by other people’s uncompensated labor,” assume that’s in fact the business model.
It is trivially true that people may gain from their work being published, even in the absence of remuneration from the publisher. For example, it may contain product placement they are being paid for, it may gain fans they can later sell products to, or it may spread ideas they wish to see popularized. Indeed, in the absence of these “parasites”, many of these would willingly pay for their work to be published, and indeed some do.
In this case, the articles in question were not made to provide this site with ad revenue or because they were commissioned by some wealthy individual, they were made to be read, and to inform others of their contents regarding rationality. Anything that allows more people to access this material aids that goal, and as such this deal is mutually beneficial to both parties. Of course, it would be nice if someone was willing to pay, but frankly none of us are going to pay (or donate our time) to produce such material, and we are fortunate that there is someone who expects sufficient benefit from this.