[3xblah]

Interesting how he chose the word "strike", commonly used to refer to workers, as if to imply users are working for Facebook or Twitter.

Every time a user submits something to them, it is arguable she is doing work for those companies. The companies do not produce content, yet they depend on it in order to draw traffic. What they provide is a centralised distribution channel. They rely on users to do the work of producing/submitting content.

[SamuelAdams]

That's one of the amazing things about social media. It has the largest unpaid workforce in history - bigger even than the slave trade. Companies aren't getting billions of dollars in stock valuations because of their 50 or so really smart employees: they're getting billions because of their user's data, and their users willingness to continuously cultivate and update that data.

That's what makes Facebook data so valuable: it's up to date and it's very detailed, all thanks to the billions of people who contribute to it.