Make It Better

A few people have leveled a criticism of crowdsourcing and social software that they encourage people to work for free. Online examples include Wikipedia and the "flag as spam" button. In fact, online sites have found success with getting their users to flag things as objectionable so that moderators of high-traffic and high-participation sites can focus on building and maintaining the site and not have to worry about reading every post/comment. A certain section of critics resent that users of the site "work for free" while the site or service owner gets rich.

I want to make the places that I live better. Some of those places are online, others are not. I'm OK with spending the few seconds each time to block a follower on Twitter if that acts as a signal to Twitter the company the investigate and possibly remove that account. I'm OK with editing a Wikipedia page if something is wrong or out of date and the fix is easy, and by making that fix or addition, make the Internet experience a bit better. I want attribution for most things, so in the Wikipedia example, I aim to make the change associated with my account there.

[in progress]