
Buzzfeed paid the teen who made its top quizzes in free swag - anigbrowl
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/buzzfeed-top-traffic-quizzes-teen.html
======
subjectsigma
What kind of insane mental gymnastics did people perform to arrive at the
conclusion that kids writing silly quizzes for free is an existential threat
to paid content creators? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it seems
like the average Twitter activist has an obsessive need to frame everything as
a societal issue in which someone is the oppressor and someone else is their
victim. Notice how the quoted tweet aims to frame the people laid off as
struggling underdogs while this girl is ignorant and priveleged because she
"can afford" to have free time. It's not BuzzFeed being exploitative that
caused the problem, or the fact that a literal child produced better work in
her free time than people with industry experience and 40 hours a week - no,
this evil is privilege at work!

~~~
anigbrowl
Way to impose your own agenda on it. That was a minor point in the article,
the reason I posted it was some disgust at the fact that a company make a
fortune off advertising then throw some cheap trash at the most productive
member of their online community that enriched them.

~~~
subjectsigma
What? It seemed to dominate the Twitter threads linked from the article.

------
tomglynch
Rediculous. This is not too dissimilar to claiming that reddit or facebook is
profiteering of their users as they submit the content.

"If you create content for free&for fun because you can afford to, there is
always the possibility that this content will be used instead of content
created by paid creators. It's up to volunteer creators to realize if&how much
their work hurts paid creators."

Well, I guess it's time to stop posting to reddit or facebook and time they
employed professional content creators...

------
zwaps
Social media work is the factory work of today. It largely requires no skill,
one is easily replacable, and more and more tasks are automated away.

The difference is, I guess, that the jobs are also appealing. People that do
this spend most their time on social media anyway, and now they can see
themselves as tech workers. But, in truth, the idea to make your passion into
a job, is problematic if that passion does not require skill.

And so, a tech Proletariat creates itself and is replaced by actual child
work.

------
matt_the_bass
Why is there no venom towards buzzfeed for this? To me they are the ones to
blame (if one is to get mad).

