It’s as if Web2 became users’ sweat shops, ha?
Everyone gives users free platforms but no one wants them to get anything meaningful out of it.You can make videos, write blogs, edit Wikipedia, but you can not gain anything but fame.
Fortune is left for the platforms.
Youtubes’ founders got their share and so will all other platforms owners. The user, the one that made it all happen for them, didn’t and won’t get a thing except for the chance to work hard for nothing.
It feels like most users are blind and all enterprises are trying to gain more and more out of their hard work.
Digg gave users the ability to mark items for them. They gave users a title if they gave them enough strong items. Once they got strong enough they forgot all about their Top Diggers.
Now, Netscape stopped marking their “power users”.
Those platfroms decided that even sharing their fame is too dangerous these days.If Web2 users were smart enough they would boycott those platforms. Same platforms that are changing the new web into a giant sweat shop.
Each of those platforms would give users exactly what they deserve after two or three days without any active users.
Those days would remind them that users have the power to change their billion dollars valuations, same valuations those Web2 users created for them and their VCs.
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May 28, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Zaid
Perhaps if you step aside and think about all the web2 companies that *aren’t* taking off as digg, as youtube etc.
For every digg and youtube that score the homerun, there are dozens that invest plenty of resource and end up closing the shop because they could not get enough users.
Which brings us to the question of what gets users. And although a big chunk of that is art than science, fact is getting lots of users and making them stick requires plenty of doing by the website owners. If *some* of those owners make _some_ money(remember – acquisitions are exceptions not norms), it isn’t exactly disrespectful to the users for whom they built and support the platform for.
July 24, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Nadav Bar-Or
I know that this post was done more than a year ago, but I just read it now. If you check out google’s knew platform Knol which is supposed to compete with Wikipedia, you will find out that the users who publish the content through this platform can earn money from ads on their published pages.