this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
16 points (94.4% liked)
Ask
427 readers
129 users here now
Rules
- Be nice
- Posts must be legitimate questions (no rage bait or sea lioning)
- No spam
- NSFW allowed if tagged
- No politics
- For support questions, please go to [email protected]
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe we come from different corners of the internet. I'm used to help people with their Linux questions and I take 15mins out of my day to write a helpful answer, and that adds up. And my wasted time is taken away from people with genuine questions.
I also like to discuss politics or random stuff. But I kind of do that because I'm interested and want to engage in a discussion with some substance to it, whatever that is. I want some human at the other end and hear their perspective. Not type something into the void. But I get you. Sometimes it works and other people come. Sometimes they don't. I just wish there was an obvious way to tell so I could balance that and not feel like I waste a good chunk of the time and all it's good for is some AI scrapers or some number.
I see where you come from, but this community is quite generic, it's not supposed to take people a lot of expertise and time to answer. "What's the best unexpected gift you ever got?" is quite open and fast to answer.
I would definitely agree for support communities, the issue has been raised recently: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19646137
I'm with you on this. Reminds me of a thing you see regularly on the StackExchange sites:
In this scenario, I can only guess the experts are not discouraged because they're there for the reputation points and it's all just a numbers game. For every case like this there'll be another where they get 100 points for their efforts. If my theory is correct then these kinds of situations are only sustainable with a karma system. Alas.
Hooray, Karma it is...
But seriously, I do that distinction as well. I consider some things as work. I'll do it for example for the money, could be Karma or whatever, and at the end of the day I try not to care if my labor has been wasted, as I mainly wanted the money. And then in the afternoon I'll do things for fun. And I love the more human motives there. I get to help people, connect to them on a human level. I volunteer stuff or just talk casually or have fun. And it's really refreshing how it's devoid of some numbers which increase on my bank account or in my profile.
There's another interesting quality of your "afternoon work": if you didn't do it, nobody else would. Paid work is by definition fungible: there's an economic demand for it, so logically if you don't do then somebody else will. Net benefit of your labor: zero! But when you work on some project from other motivations, you know that the marginal utility of your labor is 100%. Nobody's paying for it so it might never get done otherwise. It took me a while to grasp this but IMO it's an important latent motivation for volunteering.
Good take. Well... I just watched too much Star Trek when I was young. They live in a post-scarcity future. Just did away with the first thing, and do everything just because they like to do it, and with most things portrayed in the series it's at the forefront, and no one has done it before... And "utility" becomes yet a different thing. 😉