Should Community-Edited be Community-Owned?
Jason Calacanis is getting a lot of heat from his offer to hire digg’s most actice contributors.
A lot of people see this as a sellout against the pure innovator of digg, as a sellout on collective created peer creation, others see it as a way to give some of the monetary value back to the creators of the site compared to a vc-funded startup like Digg where the users isn’t gonna cash out on the value created.
I see it another way…
To me the real issue is that these community-edited and created sites really offers little value in themselves – all the value is created by the users. Why don’t we make them truly community/user-owned when what’s at the center is so little compared to the value created by the users. Like a wikipedia, like an opensource project.
Therefore i salute Jason for exposing the hypocrisy of these web version number sites where the real value isn’t in the tools, but in the collective value created by the users. It might be oldschool, but Jason is at least being straight forward about working for a megacorp wanting to hire people to create value for them.
So who creates a user-owned community edited/created site ?
a user-owned community might be more difficult to be managed. See this as an example.
It doesn’t appear that the link you mentions was user-owned – and that might have been one of the big reasons for the failure.
In the real world most communities are user-owned.
Jason is absolutely doing the right thing. Eventhough I like Digg I couldn’t help smile when their response was that they might start giving away t-shirts instead of paying.
I guess you could make an “open source” project but its not always better than the commercial project – people wanting something (money) is a strong incentive to do something special: http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/challenger.html
I don’t think it’s an issue of which is better. I think the real issue is that very few people in the future will contribute to a for-profit entity for free – if it isn’t user-owned and nonprofit. And if not, just become salaried employees of a megacorp.
Yochai Benkler nails this in much better prose than i, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/benkler_on_cala.php
Good point
What will happen to Myspace, Dating.dk.etc Will they just have their 15 minutes and then the crowd will move on to the next big thing (like a new club in the night life)?
they should be able to – but today really can’t because they’re locked in.
they can’t get their data out, they can’t be a part of the community using other tools.
seperation of tool and community is the issue. and as far as i know we’ve never seen as much lockup on community in mankind’s history before – see my debate with Tim O’reilly on this, http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/09/what_is_web_20.html
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