This is an overall issue with deciding to make payment voluntary (something online copyleft activists yoinked the anthropological term "gift culture" for without fully understanding the implications) Customers aren't better at setting prices than producers, they're terrible
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Customers just deciding how much you should get paid based on their own judgment isn't liberation of the worker It's the EXACT OPPOSITE of that Like holy shit have you never actually had customers
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Some customers really are just gigantic fucking assholes But that's not even the issue, the issue is that customers are STUPID They don't KNOW ANYTHING That's why they're customers and you're the worker, knowing things is your job
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So this is an issue with "tip discrimination" We have this ongoing (horrible) natural experiment with voluntary payment by making waitstaff and other service workers tip-based professions And one fact that leaps out at you is that tip amounts don't track "service" at all
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Like, the businesses have to fight hard against this, not because they love their workers but they need their workers to not actually starve if they want to still have a business They TELL YOU how much to tip, they've set a baseline standard (15% of the check) we all get told
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But people still fuck it up All the time They wildly overtip or undertip because they just can't do math, or it gets lost in a whole complicated thing about splitting the check, or they're in a good or bad mood that day
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Moreover, the people who actually do the asshole thing of increasing/decreasing the tip based on performance to act as an incentive are totally wasting their mental energy doing it It doesn't work and doesn't make sense
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The factors they base it on, the stuff that's most visible to them, is almost never under the direct control of the person they're tipping They *know this* -- *everyone* knows this, that the waiter doesn't actually cook your fucking food But it's still what they base it on
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"The kitchen was slow" = the waiter gets stiffed, "the kitchen sent this out undercooked" = the waiter gets stiffed, "the portion is smaller than I thought it would be" = the waiter gets stiffed
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The worst part of working this kind of job is knowing that, say, if the restaurant is really busy and chaotic, you may be rewarded for this in terms of the total *number* of tips, but the average tip will go DOWN to compensate
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They will tip you *less* than if they came in at 3 in the afternoon and they're the only people there and you're free to just hang out and shoot the breeze with them Even though they can *see* that you're *working harder*, for reasons beyond your control
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And that's not even going into the gross shit, people being racist and sexist, people sexually harassing the hot girl who has to flirt with the regulars to get tips
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Like my point is that if restaurants didn't charge a required bill at all, and instead you tipped *everyone* -- you put down a certain amount of money, and you got to decide what % of the money each staff member got -- it would be a disaster
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It wouldn't be close to fair, and it would likely lead to the business just going under
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Anyway I'm saying this is what the Internet "gift economy" is like When people get to just choose who they do and don't give money to they choose based on all kinds of weird stupid shit Like yes it's loosely correlated with overall popularity but it doesn't make SENSE
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Anyway that's the thing about how people in particular don't pay for porn It's like the clearest possible refutation of "When people really enjoy something and consume a lot of it, they'll throw money your way just because they feel good about it" Apparently not
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Porn is a specific thing that people have really fucked up attitudes about Like you'll see people who are big "fans" of porn stars who actively HATE the people they're "fans" of, who try to dox them and ruin their lives The PornWikileaks scandal etc
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But even if they don't actively hate them there's this sense of stigma Like giving out your credit card marks the difference between a regular upstanding citizen who "happens to look at porn" and a john
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It's absurd and makes no logical sense and most people who feel that way don't consciously take an (obviously hypocritical) anti-sex work position but it's an extremely widespread phenomenon that pretty clearly costs sex workers hundreds of millions of dollars a year
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That's just the most obvious example based on the most obvious social stigma The people who consume porn obviously don't want it to cease to exist, and yet they act like they do Their behavior isn't "rational" But no one's is
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I'm running out of steam talking about this but there's so many examples of projects -- whole GENRES of projects -- going under because people are willing to pay for it, while being totally willing to pay for all kinds of shit they don't care about nearly as much
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This whole set of biases that makes no sense -- freeform podcasts are "worth more" than professionally edited writing, even if the latter takes objectively more hours to make
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I'm not saying this is a problem created by the "gift economy" and "tipped professions" rather than just being a general problem But if you take negotiating power away from the seller to the maximum degree -- they can't force you to pay anything at all -- it gets so much worse
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