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Latest From Second Life Creator: Crowdsourcing Small Jobs
waderoush writes "At Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale led the creation of Second Life, a virtual world with a complex internal economy. Now he's applying some of the same ideas to the real world at Coffee & Power, a hybrid workclub and crowdsourcing marketplace for small jobs. The C&P site (which was itself crowdsourced via another Rosedale project called Worklist) matches sellers and buyers of services from personal shopping to software tutoring. Payments are handled using a virtual currency, and members can meet up to collaborate or deliver services at the C&P offices in San Francisco and Santa Monica. 'Coffee & Power is a tool that asks the question, 'If you had an extra three hours today, how many things could you do?'' Rosedale says. 'We all have a lot of skills that we don't use in our day jobs.'"
Average length of job: Half a day
Average pay of job: $12
So if you live in China, India, Nigeria, etc. and would love to work for $24 a day, great news! And for those you who live in the first world, well, enjoy the continued outsourcing that's going to have us all living in a goddamned Mad Max dystopia by the end of the century. Buy your Chinese-made shouldpads and dune buggies now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I can see this ending badly. Also I think by law they must pay in real cash as well.
So.. basically, it's Fiverr?
Crowdsourcing labor is the most bullshit anti-worker move in recent memory. Now you're not just competing against everyone else, you're competing against fractions of their time for even less money.
Was an idea I had, well someone beat me to it. :-P Well my idea was to have a company that would serve client requests for features in various FOSS projects but this idea is cooler.
It's the 20 year de-leveraging which will do it. At the end of it, $12 will be a good days pay.
Deleted
How is this, in any fashion, different than a landscaping contractor rolling up to a street corner and spot-hiring half a dozen undocumented workers for an enjoyable day of grass-mowing and leaf-blowing at 7 bucks an hour?
What could possibly go wrong?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Rent-a-Coder, Mechanical Turk, Freelancer.com, and now this.
Manpower, Inc. is one of the US's largest "employers".
because, hey, you know? freelancer.com just doesnt have enough 'passion' involved.
Here in NYC, TaskRabbit is doing, more or less, the same thing. If you have free time and want to make a few bucks, you go to their website and sign up for something to do. Works great for college students and people who really need the money. I know I've seen ads for other services that do the same thing. The big difference is that these sites take real money. Apart from Bitcoin, I don't understand the lure of using virtual currency that requires real currency to obtain. What does this accomplish?
>
What could possibly go wrong?
Spammers from third world countries.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's used by cheap labor conservatives to justify crap wages, especially for white collar IT workers. The argument goes it's OK to kill yourself making $3/hour because it's better than goofing off you lazy bastard. It's like when factory owners argued in the 19th century against the 40 hour work week because they lower classes would just spend it drinking anyway.
Hey, you know what? I like living in a world where there's more to life than endless toil. You think the rich bastards that shoved this crap down your throat in grade school work 70 hours a week? If you do, you haven't been paying attention. Here's an idea: Pay people enough to make a difference in their lives and see how much interest you get.
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It nice to know about a me-too crowd-sourcing concept (Fiverr, Zaarly etc) but it looks like an unwanted commercial in between those tech posts.
Or its just me!
This is why we need more of them and more workers rights. Freelancer / contractor also need more rights there is a lot of abuse. The cable industry is real bad with that. Also there is more stuff like change backs where you can have funds taken away from your after doing the job.
the costs and then some lets say to make a typo in a web app and they clam it broke there sever and they want to you buy them a new one.
Or on the other side it trun's out the system is very under powered to start with and it can't do the work load they want to code for them and then they come asking for all new system all at your cost as the code you added made there side go down.
The GOP will certainly be able to support this, since then they will be able to add all the virtual people to the unemployment statistics.
"If you had an extra three hours today, how many things could you do?"
What, did they change celestial mechanics and the day is now 27 hours?
I worked on this for a while but there didn't seem to be a good pay structure for QA people who were testing. I wasn't ending up getting payment, so I ended up quitting the whole deal. Maybe they have worked out the kinks by now, but I am not confident.
this is great, of-course for local jobs this will pretty quickly degenerate into cheapest bj proposals given what the majority of the people's skillz are.
You can't handle the truth.
I wonder what the IRS, state tax boards, various employment/workplace regulatory bodies and such are going to have to say about this... they're going to want their cut of the action.
I also suspect the Treasury Department may have something to say about virtual currencies being used to pay for real-world goods and services. This ain't Second Life scripted wang-doodles we're talkin' about here. Scrip is a legal minefield.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
....spot-hiring half a dozen undocumented workers for an enjoyable day of grass-mowing and leaf-blowing at 7 bucks an hour?
$7? Try $4
It raises the question.
http://begthequestion.info/
A retailer needs 500 handbags to sell to rich women...
/. for?
In the USA (and most traditional economies):
The retailer contacts a supplier who contacts a handbag company who contacts a factory in China who makes the bags and ships them to the retailer. For better or for worse, it's Capitalism in action where fancy bags come from big factories across the ocean.
In the slums of Mumbai:
The retailer contacts a supplier who goes into the slums and talks to poor women in their shacks and asks them to make him a couple bags each. He goes from shack to shack and picks up the two-three bags and gives the women a tiny payment. Then he goes to another neighborhood and distributes the bags to a dozen other ladies who stitch the patterns onto the bag. Someone else picks them all up or tells the ladies to bring the bags to another shack where they are counted and the women are paid a few cents each. The supplier ships the bags to the retailer. For better or for worse, it's crazy decentralized unregulated and unregulatable chaos Capitalism where fancy bags come from a hundred poor living rooms.
At least in the Chinese factories, workers are starting to demand better conditions and wages and there are standards and some regulations and standards in place. In India the workers get paid next to nothing because they are all working in their homes and don't have any idea who they are working for and aren't employees - work on contract only - and don't know any of their fellow workers so they can't unionize and demand better wages, and they work in their homes deep in slums so there is absolutely no regulation.
My point is that this kind of small crowdsourced job idea reminds me of the Indian model, and I don't like it.
Feel free to disagree though, what else is
If it's that serious, go search Google.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Nobody ever used it in the first place, really. (Disclaimer: That's "nobody" in the sense of "such a tiny proportion of the overall population that it might as well have been nobody".) I can't believe how much hype it generated, for a product that was obviously headed absolutely nowhere.
I got myself 2 free hour.
I got myself an account on Mechanical Turk, entered my PayPal info and such.
I clicked and clicked, do jobs big and small.
Then I stopped.
2 weeks later I checked my PayPal account.
I was eight dollar richer.
Eight dollars ain't that much, but to some poor sods in India or Guatemala, eight dollars in exchange of 2 hours of their lives still worth something.
I'm doing study on Crowdsourcing and have very limited time to write my MBA dissertation. I need to collect information from people who engaged in crowdsourcing professionally. I made a 10 question survey (takes less than 5 min) for anonymous data collection. Check it out http://svy.mk/xl6tcZ if you think it considers you, and SHARE please! Could anyone also tell me where I can share to get the highest response rate possible? Any help appreciated!
An average of 50,000 people at any given moment (it varies by time of day). About half a million regular users. That's probably more than Slashdot.
Working full time would bring at least that much money
Provided that employers are offering a position for more than $10.56 after taxes, which would be closer to $13.00 per hour. That's not guaranteed until U.S. BLS unemployment figures drop a couple more points.
Which is part of why I left the movement popularly called "evangelical Christianity": I got disillusioned with the worship of riches. As Jesus pointed out: "No one can slave for two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will stick to the one and despise the other. You cannot slave for God and for Riches." (Matthew 6:24) But not all Christian congregations that practice evangelism (i.e. spreading the message of God's coming kingdom) have the promise of worldly riches in mind.
Well my idea was to have a company that would serve client requests for features in various FOSS projects
Like Kickstarter?
Yeah, it was a pretty myopic decision to choose to use C$ as their currency denominator, considering it's already used by that giant country to the north of them.
www.clarke.ca
You are of course free to start your own business and work for yourself at any wage you can afford to pay yourself.