Apparently this is a controversial opinion based on the position of the comment, but I feel like it's a painful truth.
Spending double digit hours to polish up an insightful or useful article then posting it publicly to the internet feels like playing the lottery. There is a chance that you'll get "monetization", "opportunities", or "notoriety"; but you can be sure that the house is getting their cut. With the current web scraping models out there, it feels like the house's cut is only getting bigger and your upside is getting slimmer.
Sure posting a tutorial that you wrote anyways to help yourself digest something has low personal downside, but you're basically just crowd sourcing away a technical writer's job at whatever entity is responsible for (or benefiting from) the tech you're researching.
Maybe this is "pulling the ladder up behind you", but it feels more like "not being climbed on in a human pyramid". I would have no problems with "content" I spent time producing only benefited individuals with no compensation in return (probably still citations if warranted), but like OP said the reality is that your "content" will either be:
- not generically valuable in the first place
- iterated on without credit
- digested into the beast (blog spam & ML models) with no compensation
That's never what open source was about. It's the tragedy of the commons.
Spending double digit hours to polish up an insightful or useful article then posting it publicly to the internet feels like playing the lottery. There is a chance that you'll get "monetization", "opportunities", or "notoriety"; but you can be sure that the house is getting their cut. With the current web scraping models out there, it feels like the house's cut is only getting bigger and your upside is getting slimmer.
Sure posting a tutorial that you wrote anyways to help yourself digest something has low personal downside, but you're basically just crowd sourcing away a technical writer's job at whatever entity is responsible for (or benefiting from) the tech you're researching.
Maybe this is "pulling the ladder up behind you", but it feels more like "not being climbed on in a human pyramid". I would have no problems with "content" I spent time producing only benefited individuals with no compensation in return (probably still citations if warranted), but like OP said the reality is that your "content" will either be:
- not generically valuable in the first place
- iterated on without credit
- digested into the beast (blog spam & ML models) with no compensation
That's never what open source was about. It's the tragedy of the commons.