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Post Info TOPIC: On Trying to Exploit the Site for Free/Cheap Work


A God among Trolls

Status: Offline
Posts: 121
Date: 4:24 PM, 12/20/11
On Trying to Exploit the Site for Free/Cheap Work
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Don't do it.  /thread

No but seriously: there is nothing we will treat more seriously than someone using this site as a place to get free or cheap work for corporate or other for-profit endeavors.  An example of this would be trying to get free/cheap graphic design work done by starting a query for designing a logo for your company.  The rule of thumb here is that if you're making asking for something that could be done professionally, then your compensation should be at least as much as you would pay to have it done professionally.

You will notice that our contests for creating a logo, a design template for the site, creating original content for my writing, etc are compensated generously, are offered royalty percentages and so forth.  For example, before creating the logo contest thread, I asked my father how much he pays the graphic designer he uses for his company, he told me 75 $/hr, I figured an hours' work for a simple logo is a conservative estimate, and offered a compensation that's 133% that rate ($100).  

Help in this vein should be treated as serious work, the inquirer should go to all expected lengths in giving the poster credit, and should be willing to recommend the poster and be a reference for them professionally in a relavent line of work.

As a counter example, I offer modest compensation (if any compensation at all) for deciding how to word a sentence, finding articles, etc because I am not taking any jobs away by asking for help on this site.  If I did not have this community to ask about things like this, I would either settle for whatever options I had in front of me, ask a family member/friend for help or I just wouldn't bother at all.  I would never in a million years hire a personal editor to help me with every single sentence I write, and I still plan on commissioning professors, professional editors, etc to the same exact degree as I would had I not created a thread on the internet.  If you cannot say these things for your own queries, then you are exploiting this community by asking for it to be done for free/cheap.

We believe that collaboration is a mainstay for awesomeness, but we will punish as harshly as we see fit anyone supsect of trying to weasel uncredited, unrewarded, for-profit work from our community.  We are not out to get you, and we run on the general assumption that our community members are well-intentioned, but we will go to great measures of punishment in response to obvious exploitation.  Measures will include the standard (deleted/edited posts/threads, banning, etc.), but in extreme cases we won't hesitate to get involved in campaigns to discredit and black list your real-life name and professional entities.

Cliffnotes: this is the cardinal sin of procrastinaters.com.  We will assume you are not doing it or are doing so accidentally, but in cases where that is clearly not the case, we will take it very seriously.



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