If you think people are
conspiring to get you to write for free…you’re right. Here’s a quote from a
Business Week article by Stephen Baker called “Will Work for Praise: The Web’s
Free-Labor Economy”:
“Prahbakar Raghavan, chief of Yahoo Research (YHOO), estimates that 4% to 6% of Yahoo's users are drawn to contribute their energies for free, whether it's writing movie reviews or handling questions at Yahoo Answers. If his team could devise incentives to draw upon the knowledge and creativity of a further 5%, it could provide a vital boost. Incentives might range from contests to scoreboards to thank-you notes. "Different types of personalities respond to different point systems," he says. Raghavan has hired microeconomists and sociologists from Harvard and Columbia universities to match different types of personalities with different rewards.”
I’m certainly not against labors of love—I don’t get paid for doing this blog, for instance. But the idea that companies are out there researching ways to manipulate that impulse for their own profit does worry me. If it’s a true win-win, great. Otherwise, it calls for a closer look at the request for free work.
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