[johannes1234321]

Volunteering is a common concept in many communities. We have volunteer fire fighters, volunteer paramedics, volunteer librarians, volunteer social worker, volunteer ...

Some of these in fields, and sometimes even in close alignment to payed people.

In the context of SO there is a community producing Creative Commons (while there was recently a license change making the company less trustworthy) contents to help people and some people love helping others and the assumption is that the value this brings to all is bigger than the value for the company. Until recently the combination seemed to work. The company runs the platform to advertise their job boards and enterprise versions of SO and the community manages the content. But recently changes seem to be frustrating.

For comparison see also Wikipedia volunteers vs. Wikipedia foundation, Mozilla foundation&corp vs. Contributors, and even people happily submitting pull requests to Microsoft products on GitHub.

[falsedan]

> We have volunteer fire fighters, volunteer paramedics, volunteer librarians, volunteer social workers

None of these positions are with a private business operating for profit.

[vorpalhex]

SE does not profit from its community websites (eg the ones we all read) aside from a vague "getting traffic to its enterprise product" which is probably not worth what they spend on hosting.

[wool_gather]

They have always had ads, and they have started serving, um, new varieties of ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21051472

[falsedan]

> SE does not profit from its community websites

I don’t see how it’s my problem that their business model isn’t profitable. The board & C-suite still draw a salary, and the company value is built on unpaid labour.

[johannes1234321]

And now we are contributing for free to Y Combinator!

(True - there's not much direct revenue from this comment I'm typing here, but this is Hacker News, the place where the imorotantninfirmationnos and YC is in the center of it, don't you see how cool they are?)

[falsedan]

uh HN is not the 'business' of YC. get back to work

[johannes1234321]

It certainly is not the core business. But it is part of the business.

[syshum]

Wikipedia and Mozilla were at one time mainly Non-Profits that people volunteered at for the same reason people volunteer at other non-profits, to benefit wider society

Both are turning more and more to be more profit-seeking, (Mozilla more than Wikipedia ) and it is tarnishing their reputations

SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".

Generally speaking, I do not believe For-Profit business should be allowed to seek Volunteers for their labor, this includes SE, Reddit, etc

If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business

[mieseratte]

> SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".

> If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business

Considering executive compensation at many non-profits, I don't think non-profit status alone is a good indicator of anything.

As for SO / SE, I didn't volunteer time and effort in light of their non-profit status, I volunteered in light of their mission. It was about putting in some amount of effort to make the world a better place. I couldn't care less if they made money off of it, just like I don't care if someone takes my open-source work and manages to make a business of it.

[icebraining]

How is Wikipedia turning to be more profit-seeking?