Hot_Bid wrote: I really don't understand what you are trying to say. Do you disagree with how we presented the post or our philosophy in general? You seem to take issue with the way we present it, but everything I said in my post about volunteerism and TL is true. You seem to think it is some sort of subtle manipulation or "playing the emotional card" to hypocritically gain more profits, well if you are set on that there is nothing I can really say to dissuade you from that.
The bottom line is there is no deceit here, we don't promise payment or even the a substantial opportunity of future payment. Our writers know that very few make it to fulltime employment within ESPORTS. They simply enjoy doing what they do, and find reasons that are rewarding outside of money.
What I disagree with is the demagogy used as justification of the situation. When people started mentioning the unpaid part, you could have simply responded with "Sorry, but we cannot pay a salary to these new writers" and that's it. It may be a bit cold, but it is a clean way to do it because it is a fact. However you decided to add those things about how other writers write for free as well and how they do it out of love and passion and whatnot. You may or may not have done that purposefully, but either way I now have to take into consideration that there is a chance it was done with said manipulation in mind. The effect you've achieved is now worse than if you simply chose to avoid answering why the writers will not get paid. I am fully aware that these actions will not bite you in the behind because people love thinking with their hearts and they love TL and want to help, I'm just giving you an objective view of the situation.
We have always been honest and upfront about these kinds of things with community members, and this is no different. We simply don't care that some people may feel there is a chance that it's emotional manipulation. All the stuff we wrote about motivations and all that is true, and partially in response to users asking "why would people do this for no pay?" Frankly, just because you feel it its the "cleaner" way to remove all doubt about possible manipulation doesn't mean we're going to sacrifice openness and communication with our potential contributors. You can either believe us or not.
Hot_Bid wrote: You're comparing us to some sort of organized religion that exploits its members, laughing at people and saying "how can you work for free!??!"
I'm not sure I understood this correctly. I didn't say you laugh at people, I mentioned the organized religions because of how they count on the emotional in people for their money/time. What you said about how people who volunteer for TL do that out of love and passion for TL, it just reminded me of it. Imagine a "help repaint your church" kind of situation.
I only brought this up because organized religion has all sorts of issues that we don't typically deal with, especially in the United States. We don't ask for donations, we're not tax exempt, we don't expect our contributors to pray for TL. The fact that I have to list differences here for you is really silly, since the analogy you made in the first place comparing us to a religion is just unreasonable and frankly kind of insulting.
Hot_Bid wrote: Why do artists paint and writers without the end goal of selling their product? Why do people make fan videos? Not everything is driven by money.
Research has shown that some of the greatest inventions in history were driven purely by passion and not the desire to make money off of them. I completely agree with you on that one. However, what you want here is free quality content for your for-profit website. When they publish an article on TL, from then on it belongs to TL, not to them. If you are not willing or able to pay them salaries but still appropriate their work, then some drastic changes are required to point 6, paragraph 1 of your Terms Of Use in order for it to be at least somewhat fair for the said writers.
What makes something fair and not fair? I'm not going to get into a debate on why TL needs to own the content that we put out on our front page, because the implications are obvious there. It seems again you are very hung up on the fact that there is no monetary compensation, when in fact there is plenty of intangible non-monetary gains and rewards that our writers feel make it worth it for themselves. I posted some of these earlier, but you again said that it was manipulative to state what these possibly could be. You seem to believe that money is the only form of compensation, it is not.
Hot_Bid wrote: What you are suggesting is that there exists a model where people can be paid wages to write about ESPORTS but TL chooses not to because we're attempting to cut costs and make more profits. Unfortunately there is nothing more I can say about this accusation other than it's not true.
I wasn't talking about that when I mentioned "business model", but when you now mention that, a model which you just described certainly could exist. Without making the company's business model and finances public, we, the public, can not know either way. Oh and, please, don't say that you don't want to cut costs as much as you can and make profits as much as you can because that would be an outright lie.
The model I described obviously could exist but doesn't. Will it exist in the future? Maybe. I was responding to your accusation that the model exists and is viable right now but TL doesn't do it because we want to hoard money. That is what I said was not true, not that in general we want to keep costs down.
Hot_Bid wrote: You also seem to think this will somehow be the downfall of our website and you won't "cry when we're gone" well we'll simply just disagree on that.
No, I actually don't think at all that this is the downfall, I'm just saying that if you can't make a business model that works to a 100%, then you should switch to a Wikipedia style non-profit model because this "half this half that" is in a gray area and there will always be doubts while it is so.
First, you seem to believe that just because our volunteers aren't paid means our business model "doesn't work." Do you feel other for-profit enterprises that have volunteers don't have business models that work? Volunteer work is pretty common in even mainstream sports, for example NFL cheerleaders receive virtually nominal pay ($100 a game or something) for essentially another fulltime job. Why do they do it? There are intangible nonmonetary benefits, personal and otherwise. Just like here. Many sports writers employed fulltime by sports teams are unpaid internships. Is it because the Yankees are manipulating their ballboys to accept lower than minimum wage? I don't believe so.
Second, you make it sound so easy to just "be" Wikipedia, a site with over 35 million users and 2.7 billion monthly pageviews. Let's not enter into a debate about whether a yearly donation drive asking for handouts from an audience that is notoriously made up of young frugal college students who already pay for content across a lot of other ESPORTS channels is wise or not. I would say "we need your donations to survive!!!" from our audience demographic is far more ethically dubious than asking for volunteer writers who know exactly what they're getting into.
Lastly, I would argue that allowing non-monetary contributions like writing and liquipedia editing is far more rewarding and mutually beneficial for people that want to contribute to TL than strictly donating money to us. If you notice, we don't ask for $ donations anywhere on this site, unlike the churches you seem to compare us to.
Yes, I do believe your business model doesn't work. Again you are saying that "others do it too" which is not much of a comfort, because if there were no women willing to cheer in NFL for that nominal pay, what would happen? The teams would hire cheerleaders for full pay. What would happen if people weren't willing to write for TL for free?
That's easy. The number of news articles drops down to whatever Wax, Hotbid, R1CH, and a few others can manage. But because news articles doesn't seem to be R1CH's thing, we would mostly rely on Wax. So basically content creation drops to whatever forum posts are created, unless people refuse to create threads about tourneys because they're giving away their labour for free.
Basically TL shuts down to an average forum. What won't happen is a huge number of job postings.
But if you're problem is with volunteers as a whole, then your issue is not really TL specific than a much broader ideological issue. Ye ol Barn Raisers and volunteer relief workers
On January 10 2013 07:37 Falling wrote: Basically TL shuts down to an average forum. What won't happen is a huge number of job postings.
But if you're problem is with volunteers as a whole, then your issue is not really TL specific than a much broader ideological issue. Ye ol Barn Raisers and volunteer relief workers
Yes exactly, the quality and quantity of content will drop; I know that there won't be more job postings. That's why HotBids "it's all good" when he defended TL's business model - doesn't hold water. If it were "all good" they would hire professionals to replace the lost personnel.
And yes, I do have an ideological problem with volunteerism (in capitalism + helping for-profit ventures, both those parts are important) and I wrote that in one post to someone already. Sorry, I don't understand that reference from the last sentence.
Hot_Bid wrote: I really don't understand what you are trying to say. Do you disagree with how we presented the post or our philosophy in general? You seem to take issue with the way we present it, but everything I said in my post about volunteerism and TL is true. You seem to think it is some sort of subtle manipulation or "playing the emotional card" to hypocritically gain more profits, well if you are set on that there is nothing I can really say to dissuade you from that.
The bottom line is there is no deceit here, we don't promise payment or even the a substantial opportunity of future payment. Our writers know that very few make it to fulltime employment within ESPORTS. They simply enjoy doing what they do, and find reasons that are rewarding outside of money.
What I disagree with is the demagogy used as justification of the situation. When people started mentioning the unpaid part, you could have simply responded with "Sorry, but we cannot pay a salary to these new writers" and that's it. It may be a bit cold, but it is a clean way to do it because it is a fact. However you decided to add those things about how other writers write for free as well and how they do it out of love and passion and whatnot. You may or may not have done that purposefully, but either way I now have to take into consideration that there is a chance it was done with said manipulation in mind. The effect you've achieved is now worse than if you simply chose to avoid answering why the writers will not get paid. I am fully aware that these actions will not bite you in the behind because people love thinking with their hearts and they love TL and want to help, I'm just giving you an objective view of the situation.
We have always been honest and upfront about these kinds of things with community members, and this is no different. We simply don't care that some people may feel there is a chance that it's emotional manipulation. All the stuff we wrote about motivations and all that is true, and partially in response to users asking "why would people do this for no pay?" Frankly, just because you feel it its the "cleaner" way to remove all doubt about possible manipulation doesn't mean we're going to sacrifice openness and communication with our potential contributors. You can either believe us or not.
Hot_Bid wrote: You're comparing us to some sort of organized religion that exploits its members, laughing at people and saying "how can you work for free!??!"
I'm not sure I understood this correctly. I didn't say you laugh at people, I mentioned the organized religions because of how they count on the emotional in people for their money/time. What you said about how people who volunteer for TL do that out of love and passion for TL, it just reminded me of it. Imagine a "help repaint your church" kind of situation.
I only brought this up because organized religion has all sorts of issues that we don't typically deal with, especially in the United States. We don't ask for donations, we're not tax exempt, we don't expect our contributors to pray for TL. The fact that I have to list differences here for you is really silly, since the analogy you made in the first place comparing us to a religion is just unreasonable and frankly kind of insulting.
Hot_Bid wrote: Why do artists paint and writers without the end goal of selling their product? Why do people make fan videos? Not everything is driven by money.
Research has shown that some of the greatest inventions in history were driven purely by passion and not the desire to make money off of them. I completely agree with you on that one. However, what you want here is free quality content for your for-profit website. When they publish an article on TL, from then on it belongs to TL, not to them. If you are not willing or able to pay them salaries but still appropriate their work, then some drastic changes are required to point 6, paragraph 1 of your Terms Of Use in order for it to be at least somewhat fair for the said writers.
What makes something fair and not fair? I'm not going to get into a debate on why TL needs to own the content that we put out on our front page, because the implications are obvious there. It seems again you are very hung up on the fact that there is no monetary compensation, when in fact there is plenty of intangible non-monetary gains and rewards that our writers feel make it worth it for themselves. I posted some of these earlier, but you again said that it was manipulative to state what these possibly could be. You seem to believe that money is the only form of compensation, it is not.
Hot_Bid wrote: What you are suggesting is that there exists a model where people can be paid wages to write about ESPORTS but TL chooses not to because we're attempting to cut costs and make more profits. Unfortunately there is nothing more I can say about this accusation other than it's not true.
I wasn't talking about that when I mentioned "business model", but when you now mention that, a model which you just described certainly could exist. Without making the company's business model and finances public, we, the public, can not know either way. Oh and, please, don't say that you don't want to cut costs as much as you can and make profits as much as you can because that would be an outright lie.
The model I described obviously could exist but doesn't. Will it exist in the future? Maybe. I was responding to your accusation that the model exists and is viable right now but TL doesn't do it because we want to hoard money. That is what I said was not true, not that in general we want to keep costs down.
Hot_Bid wrote: You also seem to think this will somehow be the downfall of our website and you won't "cry when we're gone" well we'll simply just disagree on that.
No, I actually don't think at all that this is the downfall, I'm just saying that if you can't make a business model that works to a 100%, then you should switch to a Wikipedia style non-profit model because this "half this half that" is in a gray area and there will always be doubts while it is so.
First, you seem to believe that just because our volunteers aren't paid means our business model "doesn't work." Do you feel other for-profit enterprises that have volunteers don't have business models that work? Volunteer work is pretty common in even mainstream sports, for example NFL cheerleaders receive virtually nominal pay ($100 a game or something) for essentially another fulltime job. Why do they do it? There are intangible nonmonetary benefits, personal and otherwise. Just like here. Many sports writers employed fulltime by sports teams are unpaid internships. Is it because the Yankees are manipulating their ballboys to accept lower than minimum wage? I don't believe so.
Second, you make it sound so easy to just "be" Wikipedia, a site with over 35 million users and 2.7 billion monthly pageviews. Let's not enter into a debate about whether a yearly donation drive asking for handouts from an audience that is notoriously made up of young frugal college students who already pay for content across a lot of other ESPORTS channels is wise or not. I would say "we need your donations to survive!!!" from our audience demographic is far more ethically dubious than asking for volunteer writers who know exactly what they're getting into.
Lastly, I would argue that allowing non-monetary contributions like writing and liquipedia editing is far more rewarding and mutually beneficial for people that want to contribute to TL than strictly donating money to us. If you notice, we don't ask for $ donations anywhere on this site, unlike the churches you seem to compare us to.
Yes, I do believe your business model doesn't work. Again you are saying that "others do it too" which is not much of a comfort, because if there were no women willing to cheer in NFL for that nominal pay, what would happen? The teams would hire cheerleaders for full pay. What would happen if people weren't willing to write for TL for free?
That's easy. The number of news articles drops down to whatever Wax, Hotbid, R1CH, and a few others can manage. But because news articles doesn't seem to be R1CH's thing, we would mostly rely on Wax. So basically content creation drops to whatever forum posts are created, unless people refuse to create threads about tourneys because they're giving away their labour for free.
I'm actually curious to know how most people use TL. I myself mainly just read TL for the forums and stream links and rarely read any of the original content myself. If there was a similar forum with the same amount of forum activity I would also probably read those forums, but to my knowledge there's no forum comparable except reddit, but reddit isn't the same as a traditional forum. However, TL and reddit are the only two esports forums I read.
I also do that for other sites as well. I'm a huge hockey fan and like to read hfboards a lot because it has a large user base with very active forums, but I never read any of the original content from hfboards itself and am just there to read their forums because I am only interested in their forums and not their original content.
On January 10 2013 06:54 snively wrote: are the application essays going to be published??? i wanna read the awesome things people can come up with!!! :DDDD <3
To my knowledge TL doesn't post submissions. Applicants are free to post what they submit, though.
On January 10 2013 08:26 Falling wrote: I was just guessing you would also be against volunteer relief workers, barn raisers, soup kitchens, church volunteer, Doctor without Borders, etc.
I'm not sure why you compare volunteers for non profit businesses and volunteers for for profit businesses. I think that other poster has a similar, but more drastic stance than myself. I don't have issues with volunteers myself. I'm just baffled at the extent people will go to make excuses for why people should volunteer for a for profit site and that anyone to question that is wrong or doesn't have enough passion.
Would you volunteer your time for your job and forgo some of your salary if your employer asked you to? Should all the EA employees and other people in the games industry be happy at getting shafted on OT pay before or should they be happy to volunteer their OT time for the sake of the games industry? I know a lot of a salaried jobs have expectations of some unpaid OT, so I'm not talking about those situations.
I understand that the esports scene isn't healthy enough to pay everyone in the scene and volunteers are needed, but I equate those spots more for small sites or small tournaments. TL is the dominant site in the the starcraft scene and is a for profit site. I just feel a lot of people tend to overlook the fact that TL has been a for profit site since SC 2 launched and still tend to think of it the same way it was during bw. If TL wasn't a for profit site, I wouldn't hold the same stance. No one thinks people should line up to volunteer for microsoft and google (in regards to actually doing work for them and not helping in any charitable functions they may be involved in), but everyone thinks people should line up to work for TL for free.
Application sent. I'd wish myself good luck, but I never have any luck either way, so I'll wish luck to all applicants but myself! Given what the volunteers here on the site have put out before, I'm sure the people who end up writing on TL will be nothing short of amazing, as I would expect from the site.
No, not everything is about money. Some of it is about intellectual property. Attribution and copyright to the writers who don't get paid for their work is the bare minimum that they should have. I'm avoiding the word "royalty" because it's "about money" but you know it should be there as well.
I have a funny scenario in my mind where Fionn once again writes an article with every prediction wrong and then decides to call on his copyrighted material and pulls his article from the website. That of course shouldn't be able to happen and the article shouldn't be able to be pulled from the website, but if you don't buy his article, he should nonetheless have copyright to use it outside of TL in any way he wants.
Why wouldnt he have the copyright to use it outside of TL? How do you come to this conclusion?
Are people seriously complaining about this being on a volunteer basis? People want to volunteer. Teamliquid wants volunteers. Everybody is happy. What the hell is the problem?
No, not everything is about money. Some of it is about intellectual property. Attribution and copyright to the writers who don't get paid for their work is the bare minimum that they should have. I'm avoiding the word "royalty" because it's "about money" but you know it should be there as well.
I have a funny scenario in my mind where Fionn once again writes an article with every prediction wrong and then decides to call on his copyrighted material and pulls his article from the website. That of course shouldn't be able to happen and the article shouldn't be able to be pulled from the website, but if you don't buy his article, he should nonetheless have copyright to use it outside of TL in any way he wants.
Why wouldnt he have the copyright to use it outside of TL? How do you come to this conclusion?
No, not everything is about money. Some of it is about intellectual property. Attribution and copyright to the writers who don't get paid for their work is the bare minimum that they should have. I'm avoiding the word "royalty" because it's "about money" but you know it should be there as well.
I have a funny scenario in my mind where Fionn once again writes an article with every prediction wrong and then decides to call on his copyrighted material and pulls his article from the website. That of course shouldn't be able to happen and the article shouldn't be able to be pulled from the website, but if you don't buy his article, he should nonetheless have copyright to use it outside of TL in any way he wants.
Why wouldnt he have the copyright to use it outside of TL? How do you come to this conclusion?
The tricky part is that TL was based in translating content from the korean websites. Technically there is little TL can do if I decide to store all what I post here on another website (like my own) and monetize it (through ads) as I am the sole owner of my work. And it becomes even weirder if I decides to translate it.
In fact, like almost all terms of use in the IT industry, the wording you used probably wouldn't stand a trial in the USA - and that's if the person you sue is willing to be trialed under New York's State laws which he could refuse.
On January 10 2013 08:26 Falling wrote: I was just guessing you would also be against volunteer relief workers, barn raisers, soup kitchens, church volunteer, Doctor without Borders, etc.
Not that I don't think TL is great, but those that you listed are bare/basic needs, whereas TL is secondary to having a house or food or not being diseased.
I can do a tournament recap of HyperX 10-Year Anniversary Tournament right?(under major tournaments in liquipedia) And for the tournament preview, I can do any tournament? Just want to make sure
EPT
That of course shouldn't be able to happen and the article shouldn't be able to be pulled from the website, but if you don't buy his article, he should nonetheless have copyright to use it outside of TL in any way he wants.
