Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
It depends how large your definition of "cabal" is. There are plenty of corporations who are misaligned with societal positives, consisting of people individually acting in the interest of the corporation as part of their day jobs. When your job's long term success requires helping your company get an edge over the competition and you're willing to be expedient with long term thinking, in aggregate bad things can happen.
Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it.
Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps.
And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you.
I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this
There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.
(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)
I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible
- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.
- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."
While a lot of this involved volunteers and people taking initiative, a lot of this is also people working and being paid to do so. Linus Torvalds was getting paid to work on the Linux kernel from pretty early on, for example. And a lot of contributions made to Linux are done by software engineers working for a very wide range of companies that each have their own commercial interest in moving the Linux kernel forward or getting their drivers or whatever.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
This has happened with most of the fields - volunteers do a lot of work, make their fields/areas good, raise interest, bring ppl into it which usually brings money then which usually brings money chasers who then usually "optimize" the hell out of every metric for maximum gains.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
Missed some mentions like crowdfunding, crowd-sourced journalism / investigative efforts & the like. But a good read.
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
I enjoyed this article - it gives a definition of "peer production", and explains our sense of unease when voluntary collaborative efforts get mixed with financial gains.
> Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
It’s interesting how we feel unfairly treated when we publish software for free, with a license that clearly states that others can do anything with it, and others go and do whatever they want, like you said they could, but only when it involves monetary benefit to them. Thinking about it, it really makes no sense. Why do we feel upset about that? It feels like we’re lying to ourselves. We didn’t really mean you can do anything! Come on, read between the lines! Hm, sorry but I cannot condone this attitude. There is a license that says what you more likely meant, that’s called GPL. But people seem to rarely use that. Humans are intrinsically contradictory in their behavior.
I'm sure there are people who love working in the sewer, like Norton.
But I doubt there are enough to fill the need for them.
I contribute to open source. I made my peace long ago with someone using what I wrote to make money. (In fact, it pleases me if they make money off of it!)
If you contribute to open source, but get mad that someone is using it without paying you, then you did not contribute in good faith. It's like those religious cults who will press a "free" book on you, and then demand a "donation".
This was only ever true in the form of a "take a penny, leave a penny" jar.
You don't necessarily mind people profiting off of your contributions because you have been profiting from other peoples' contributions at your job. Take away the jobs and suddenly there isn't enough grant money to go around to keep the lights on.
It is truly a wonder, building the complex technical framework of modern computing was achieved a community project. It shown even with out market incentives we can go a long way, to solve the current challenges like AI and misinformation.
> user: cowlevel
> created: 31 days ago
> ^^
> karma: 1515
None of the comments you posted here added any value either so by your logic your also brand new account is an LLM bot. Not to mention posting dozens of comments nonstop all day, at a rate most humans would not. Projection much?
I like how you can post 75 bullshit comments a day here and it won't set off any troll detector but if you dare to challenge hivemind opinions, your account is irreparably mass-flagged.
From the paranoia, It is unreal we thought Turing test to be a major hurdle for ai in past.
Sadly the community aspect which was the idea of the post is threatened, as internet becomes a phantom world filled with bots, agents and clueless humans.
Peer production didn’t vanish—it got layered. Linux/Wikipedia are the wins; Reddit is the cautionary tale: decentralized volunteer work, centralized ownership. Today a lot of “community” is free upstream labor for platforms and models, without fork/leaver rights. Saving the spirit probably means designing commons before the IPO moment, not preaching passion after the means are gone.
Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
+1
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control"
Then comes stuff like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th...
and
https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...
and
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots...
and
https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads...
and
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum...
and
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps...
and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts?
It depends how large your definition of "cabal" is. There are plenty of corporations who are misaligned with societal positives, consisting of people individually acting in the interest of the corporation as part of their day jobs. When your job's long term success requires helping your company get an edge over the competition and you're willing to be expedient with long term thinking, in aggregate bad things can happen.
Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it. Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps. And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you.
I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this
There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.
(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)
I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible
There is the incentive too which LLMs destroy:
- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.
- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> who had the skills and the means to do it.
emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.
But the gravy train is ending...
While a lot of this involved volunteers and people taking initiative, a lot of this is also people working and being paid to do so. Linus Torvalds was getting paid to work on the Linux kernel from pretty early on, for example. And a lot of contributions made to Linux are done by software engineers working for a very wide range of companies that each have their own commercial interest in moving the Linux kernel forward or getting their drivers or whatever.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
This has happened with most of the fields - volunteers do a lot of work, make their fields/areas good, raise interest, bring ppl into it which usually brings money then which usually brings money chasers who then usually "optimize" the hell out of every metric for maximum gains.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
Goodhart's law: whatever you measure will improve. And the measurement is money extraction.
Missed some mentions like crowdfunding, crowd-sourced journalism / investigative efforts & the like. But a good read.
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
Open access link to the full book the article is based on (since it's slightly hidden on the book page):
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/6212/Peer-Production
Excellent reminder. It very often feels like this place forgets where most of the good stuff comes from.
And that it's dying and needs high-quality contributors (not high-quantity)
We, the people, built the internet, and as usual it has been ruined by governments (censorship) and corporations (ads, tracking, monetization).
"How volunteers build the Internet", yet not a single mention of BSD that ran and runs the Internet.
I enjoyed this article - it gives a definition of "peer production", and explains our sense of unease when voluntary collaborative efforts get mixed with financial gains.
> Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
That's not exactly how it was. I recommend reading "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years
> Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
It’s interesting how we feel unfairly treated when we publish software for free, with a license that clearly states that others can do anything with it, and others go and do whatever they want, like you said they could, but only when it involves monetary benefit to them. Thinking about it, it really makes no sense. Why do we feel upset about that? It feels like we’re lying to ourselves. We didn’t really mean you can do anything! Come on, read between the lines! Hm, sorry but I cannot condone this attitude. There is a license that says what you more likely meant, that’s called GPL. But people seem to rarely use that. Humans are intrinsically contradictory in their behavior.
I'm sure there are people who love working in the sewer, like Norton.
But I doubt there are enough to fill the need for them.
I contribute to open source. I made my peace long ago with someone using what I wrote to make money. (In fact, it pleases me if they make money off of it!)
If you contribute to open source, but get mad that someone is using it without paying you, then you did not contribute in good faith. It's like those religious cults who will press a "free" book on you, and then demand a "donation".
This was only ever true in the form of a "take a penny, leave a penny" jar.
You don't necessarily mind people profiting off of your contributions because you have been profiting from other peoples' contributions at your job. Take away the jobs and suddenly there isn't enough grant money to go around to keep the lights on.
I thought about suggesting that AI slop will replace humans here, but then I remembered how awful Grokipedia is, so we are safe for the time being.
It is truly a wonder, building the complex technical framework of modern computing was achieved a community project. It shown even with out market incentives we can go a long way, to solve the current challenges like AI and misinformation.
This account is an AI karmabot
How do you figure? The account has karma 0, and the message has a good number of spelling mistakes.
It's a brand new one, and the spelling mistakes are to avoid tripping HN's shiny new LLM detector that deads LLM comments.
How did you conclude that from a single comment and no posts?
Genuinely curious.
Fits the pattern. Brand new account, posts a summary of the article with no new value.
> Fits the pattern. Brand new account
None of the comments you posted here added any value either so by your logic your also brand new account is an LLM bot. Not to mention posting dozens of comments nonstop all day, at a rate most humans would not. Projection much?if you don't have showdead turned on, you'd miss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50389079 which is that but worse
I like how you can post 75 bullshit comments a day here and it won't set off any troll detector but if you dare to challenge hivemind opinions, your account is irreparably mass-flagged.
Hm? I'm just pointing out that the problem cowlevel is pointing out is real and not imagined.
No sir, I have just created an account. I just shared my honest response after reading this post. you have to buy yourself a new AI-dar!
> This account is an AI karmabot
Considering you have posted > 75 comments to HN in the last 24 hours, I would agree you are a karmabot!
From the paranoia, It is unreal we thought Turing test to be a major hurdle for ai in past.
Sadly the community aspect which was the idea of the post is threatened, as internet becomes a phantom world filled with bots, agents and clueless humans.
Peer production didn’t vanish—it got layered. Linux/Wikipedia are the wins; Reddit is the cautionary tale: decentralized volunteer work, centralized ownership. Today a lot of “community” is free upstream labor for platforms and models, without fork/leaver rights. Saving the spirit probably means designing commons before the IPO moment, not preaching passion after the means are gone.