Yeah we need to talk about how the whole talking point "If people really LOVE your work, they'll give you money voluntarily, from the fullness of their heart" was always shitty but it's especially CLEARLY NOT TRUE for certain fields Like, obviously, pornhttps://twitter.com/MelanieMoore/status/1271690748476264453 …
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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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End of conversation
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