A meme counter-arguing the claim "Without a profit motive, no one would be productive!" by showing examples of unpaid productivity: Wikipedia, complex Minecraft builds, open-source code, and volunteer firefighters.

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[–] 40 points 7 months ago (6 children)

The profit motive is also the source of enshittification.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Meanwhile Steam is successful by just not trying to squeeze every last penny they possibly can out of you, and they have a massive grip on games. It's almost like you get more money by not pissing off the people giving you money

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Whilst also ignoring the fascists in their forums, and allegedly firing all their moderators who could deal with such problems.

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Hey, I'm all of these. 🙃

    ( * Well, a Luanti player and server hoster)

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago

    I've never done anything with a profit incentive in my life

    ...and it's becoming a problem. 😭

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (17 children)

    I honestly struggle to understand people who say stuff like this

    Like, do they honestly not have anything productive they would choose to do if they didn't have anything else taking up all their time? What do they envision they do with themselves?

    We're humans, humans innately get a kick out of building and creating things, that's the human nature part. When we don't experience that, it's usually down to having the energy ground out of us from our current work or die existence.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (15 children)

    Problem is, no one wants to lay concrete if instead they could be playing violin.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago

    I don't even think that's necessarily true. Sure I don't want to lay concrete all afternoon in the blazing sun just like yesterday. But if I had the opportunity and material and could wait for a nice day, I'd totally redo the side walks around my neighborhood three squares at a time. And then go play the violin (ukulele).

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    I think you'd be surprised. Lot of people like doing things like that and are more put off by the conditions we ask them to work in.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    No one would work fast food or retail, but that might be ok.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Even that would happen.

    In the Freedom Town debacle, the Libertarian dream^tm^. Where everything was profit -centered. They had a problem with trash because nobody wanted to do that no matter how much they were being paid.

    So the town had giant trash heaps everywhere, which attracted bears. And everyone moved or died. The end.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah it would, it just wouldn't look the same. Looking to pre-capitalist societies you find people still making and selling things. Are they doing it for money? Yes and no. An Ale house for example was literally just Ale being sold out of a person's house and that person would change on a rotation as it was made and sold by different people. This was for like a community service than a profit based business venture.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    And let's say 95% of people act civilly, but 5% of the population is extremely greedy. How do you limit the greedy from drinking all the ale and not contributing to the community?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Well the example I gave was literally during the time of feudalism so in that society you didn't. I'm a social sciencentist but I don't have all the answers as, like you pointed out, bad actors are typically a minority which hijackes the society they are in. I don't think we need to know everything to make a better world, we should start with what we can. If you or I ever find a definitive answer I hope we share that with everyone we can.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    That's a noble goal. This is basically the biggest argument against collectivism. If you don't have even a framework for addressing it I doubt you will get much support for your ideas.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Uhh buddy I said I didn't know because I was being humble and not trying to act like I have 100% answers to everything when I'm just commenting to a post on my phone. We can easily look towards work around self determination theory if you want motivation, but I think you more meant organizational structures and incentive structures or maybe trying to identify and handle potential bad actors through dark tetrad personality assessment. I actually do research in these areas and the evidence isn't some nebulous idea, I just don't have the time to collect and present to you the work on a topic like this. Go read some science, there is a lot of good stuff out there if you want to learn.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Wdym no one. Like, that's bascially how ancient civilisation do stuff, no profit, just building.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    Actually, that's wrong. Developed ancient civilizations (the ones that build roads) used money too. And slavery. And i'm not only talking about ancient Rome or Greece. Mesopotamia, Hindus valley... all of them.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    That's not ancient enough. Go even way back, where people build for community.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    African tribes? But they were small enough, that top-down ruling worked somewhat.

    Not that this way of living – our instincts are geared to – is wrong. A modern interpretation is federalism, no? Only that the details of what is ruled on which level are often subotimal and the smallest piece usually too big.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    How many concrete pours did ancient civilizations do though?

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    We're not talking about "pouring concrete" in a literal way though, right? What i take from OP is people don't express themselves with hard labour work when they can do it with easier stuff, which is completely wrong, because one, people build big stuff for fun all the time, and two, people can and do actually do both.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago

    Would I be wrong to say this is true for most research too? Seems like a missed opportunity not including that.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I’m with you on this. But if(“true”) makes me want to murder people.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago*

    Good eye, looks like that source code image is AI-generated, it looks like no programming language I've seen before. It looks closest to a weird hybrid of COBOL and Javascript.

    My apologies for unintentionally exposing innocent people to that, I was not aware.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    https://www.irasutoya.com/

    Free clipart man is basically responsible for every single sign in Japan.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    Trust fund kids make even better test group for this

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (14 children)

    Firefighters still charge you.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (12 children)

    Volunteer firefighters charge you? I mean sometimes they ask for donations I guess.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    In belgium the personal statute of the firefighters themselves doesn’t matter for the eventual invoice. Some services are paying, other are not (yet). They get compensated for their time though. Who the fuck would not compensate them for their services? I nearly lost my father a couple of times and I practically never saw him growing because he was so invested in that… imagine that for free…

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I agree that it is absolutely worth funding fire departments and paying the workers! In the US we have both "professional" (paid) and volunteer (unpaid) firefighters. The volunteers are almost always in rural counties. They have other, unrelated jobs, and are "on call" in their free time (they carry around a radio).

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Well so are our volunteers :) They have daytime jobs + firefighters by night or on the weekends. And they are paid / compensated for their hours in the service.

    Yours are not?!

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    The fire department I volunteered at charged you for stuff like car crashes. A few weeks ago I got a bill from the fire department for a car accident I caused. Maybe it's a European thing? The fire department does get funding from the country and from events they host (that's probably just an Austrian thing)

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Just Austria being weird it sounds like to me

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Well you see, Bob...

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  • [+] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Yeah, we all know that WIKIPEDIA EDITORS are the highest of the high in status, so many famous Wikipedia editors such as;

    And don't forget

    So much status

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  • The ability to perform a task well, possessing a useful/impressive/entertaining skill, or at least being useful to a group has generally rewarded a person with status throughout human history, regardless of motive or incentive. Sometimes, that status is limited to very specific peers, though it can often provide various levels of status in a larger societal sense.

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