[pdubbs90]

Maybe the distinction lies in the filtering. Stackoverflow and Wikipedia have high quality because only people that really care about a subject (and thus usually know a lot) will invest time for free.

Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.

Your friends who are employed were filtered by the hiring process. I imagine Google would be much worse if they hired everyone who applied.

[CM30]

> Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.

Yep. Seen this on a forum called Digitalpoint, back when they had revenue sharing for posts. In theory, that should have made people post higher quality content given the financial reward for doing so. In practice? It inspired thousands of people from third world countries to join and post uninspired gibberish for the chance to get their Adsense ID used in every thread they posted in. A site that already had problems with spammers registering and posting meaningless content for signature backlinks ended up getting flooded by people who saw it as a convenient get rich quick scheme.

[olegkikin]

I disagree.

Photoshop is objectively better than GIMP.

With larger audience you will have a greater variety, more bad and good content. Good content tends to float to the top, bad one is ignored, on average. Everyone benefits.

[pdubbs90]

This is missing the last point of my argument though. Paid professionals like those that build Photoshop or Google are filtered by the hiring process.

Steemit (and I assume Woyano in the parent) is lacking both the GIMP/Wikipedia filter of people who are willing to work for free and the Photoshop/Google filter of screening people for ability before paying them to do something. This can land it in an unhappy valley where people are encouraged to churn out whatever and sheer volume makes it harder for good content to rise to the top.

I’m not saying it’s impossible for a model like this to work, just that it’s easy to fall into a trap where the best strategy to make money is to churn out low-quality content and so that’s what you get flooded with. Think of it as similar to the clickbait problem in online journalism.