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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Sharecropping is kind of a weird analogy to use here.

In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward.

In technology, "sharecropping" is the high risk venture. The landlord here assumes no risk at all if your application fails. The burden falls squarely on you. However, with the high risk, if you hit it big, the payoff potential is huge.

So while there are some parallels, from a business point of view, working with someone else's platform is nothing at all like sharecropping.

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Huh?

Sharecropping exists when landowners have limited access to capital, but extensive land holdings and abundant access to indigent labor. It was a technique devised to keep the tenant around until after harvest time.

Poor farmers have lots of children, and the large resulting labor force gives the landlord an incentive to evict the tenant or jack up the rent immediately after harvest. It was popular in places like Scotland, Ireland and the Reconstruction South, so you can be sure the system is/was more beneficial to the land owner.

Sharecropping is an arrangement with a land owner who rents out their land to a farmer for the payment of a percentage of the crop instead of cash.

It reduces the risk for the farmer because they only have to pay based on what they are able to grow instead of a fixed amount as seen in most cash-rent arrangements. The landowner stands to lose if the crop is a failure, but can make more if the crop is a success.

The term may also come with some historical meaning, but that is what sharecropping has come to mean today.

Edit: Down vote me if you wish, but that is what sharecropping is in the rural community. Speaking as a farmer, sharecropping is a great way to access land in a low-risk way. I don't know why sharecropping land is seen as a negative.

I accept that in response to abuses, the practice may have evolved over time. However, that does not in any way diminish the value of the metaphor, because the vast majority of people who encounter the word “sharecropper” think of the kind of farmer who can be evicted after harvest and often were.

Further to that, I strongly suspect that most of those who are aware that the practice has evolved since those draconian times read the metaphor and immediately grasp that the metaphor refers to the historical meaning of the word and can go on to extract value from it without belabouring a pedantic point.

I will go further and challenge you: When you read the above posts, were you unaware of the historical behaviour of landlords and sharecroppers? Is it news to you that this practice was so abused that the word has pejorative overtones even though the practice may have evolved in modern times?

Or is it simply that you wish to share with us the interesting news that times have changed for farming sharecroppers even if they haven’t for developers on proprietary platforms?

The term computer used to mean a person who sat at a desk doing mathematical calculations. When someone talks about their Amazon computing cluster, I don't picture a huge office building full of people putting pen to paper, crunching numbers all day long, even though that is exactly what computing cluster would have meant at one point in time.

When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today, not hundreds of years ago. I am familiar of the stories of "sharecroppers" of the past, but sharecropping does not refer to those people anymore. Words are evolving all the time and present day usage is what is important when communicating with others.

When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today

Only people who know that this term is still being used today and in what context. I suspect that most people don't know this, and will revert to the historical meaning.

The term sharecropper has two meanings.

The first one is the modern day practice. "He's a sharecropper because he uses share cropping in his business" refers to the modern day agricultural practice. Whatever economic system they use is irrelevant.

In almost all other cases, particularly in regards to Technology, it refers to the old school practice of share cropping and is using it as such.

Present day usage has nothing to do with it. It is all about context. If 80% of HN agree that sharecropper means X, then it means X. Sharecropper in this sense has become a piece of jargon among business and technology folks.

The old-school practice is the same as the modern-day practice: the landlord rented his land to tenant farmers in exchange for a share of their crop. randomdata's statement:

> In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward.

is just as true of sharecropping in 1911 as of sharecropping in 2011.

The difference he draws between sharecropping on a farm and sharecropping on a web site doesn't make sense, though.

I also interpreted the word as randomdata did.

I think this is an American thing. When I think of sharecropping it makes me think of farmers under a landlord in medieval England or something. Not a great power dynamic but the word isn't all that negative, it just emphasises (when used as a metaphor elsewhere) that you work and stay at the landlord's pleasure.

I've heard americans use the word before but didn't realise it came loaded with all this historical meaning from the slavery era, turning it into a highly negative concept.

In USAmerican schools, children are taught that sharecropping was an unethical farming practice (ab)used by former slave owners. Perhaps modern day farmers are aware of the modern sharecropping practice, but it certainly isn't taught in schools, nor is it in the common experience.

Most Americans have long left the "rural community" and equate sharecropping with the exploitation of freed slaves after the end of the Civil War.

Thank you. At least in the United States, sharecropping has historical associations with racism and Jim Crow. Suggesting that sharecropping is a low risk way to farm is ignoring the cultural implications if the term. As if former slaves and their descendants made a rational economic decision to become oppressed.

Seems like it is still a bad metaphor then: are Facebook platform developers really analogous to freed slaves?

the term everyone means is not sharecropping its Farm renting...the Big farm owner rents out certain parcels because he has neither the time nor the labor and equipment to plant and harvest...

But, like the much maligned sharecropping its heavily tipped in the Farm owners favor.

If I overreacted, I apologize. I've heard of farmers leasing land, but I've never heard the term "sharecropper" used in a modern setting.

My grandfather's family were sharecroppers in Ireland, so I grew up with view of the practice that may be somewhat one-sided.

I disagree; I think the analogy is apt.

You lack the resource to grow your business, so you borrow someone else's and operate at their whim.

Contracts aside, the sharecropper's entire livelihood could be undermined on the whim of the landowner. Someone else has power over your ability to produce.

Not at all. Sharecroppers are typically protected by contract law; landlords can't just arbitrarily evict them in the middle of the growing season. By contrast Facebook can change their API or terms of service at any time. Facebook developers have no way to seek redress (except the court of public opinion).

Only an idiot would evict the farmer in the middle of the season. You wait until after the harvest.

As I said, "Contracts aside...".

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