Unfortunately, this seems a naive take; the core mission of the network is to serve the commercial purposes of the business.
Expecting a business - with infamous episodes of contempt towards moderators - to behave in the idealistic way presented here is naïve.
Might it submit to pressure? Perhaps. But the wording of this letter in its presumption of the motives of a private organisation misunderstands the reality of the commercial world.
Are you familiar with strike tactics?
But that's getting off the topic of whether or not the wording of the quoted paragraph reflects reality.
Not in this case. The exchange is real but non-monetary.
>But that's getting off the topic
No, not really.
not off-topic at all - but I think you just noticed that your argument doesn't hold.
That's an incredibly naive take. Do you think there is an abundance of moderators just waiting to fill the ranks? Several SE sites are struggling with a lack of moderators already.
Similarly, there is no abundance of community members curating questions and answers. It's all volunteers, and it's not like there's a huge untapped pool that they can access on-demand.
It's kinda like saying that the entire community can be easily replaced because it's free. No, the community is the business value!
Lastly, the main anti-spam tool of the site (smokedetector-se.org - community-built and -hosted) is also offline as part of the strike. The tooling built by SE the site is in no way shape or form adequate for combating the amount of spam the site receives. Sure, it's not irreplaceable, but it's not "free".
Hence recent developments of large brands committing billion-dollar acts of seppuku in near-realtime: somebody is pulling strings in non-obvious, non-"free market" ways.
It's a zany time to be alive, and one hopes that sites like this one can help redistribute a "free market" sensibility that seems on the wane.
Could you cite examples? I don’t really keep up to date with the news so I would like to know?
Is this the index fund conspiracy theory again? Where companies like Vanguard supposedly form some sort of shadowy evil cabal that secretly controls the entire economy?
Specifically, organization of contributors actually sounds like a very effective way of holding these morally dubious “content” middle men accountable. The consumers are too heterogeneous, numerous, and uninvested to realistically coordinate.
When companies talk about their "mission", they are referring more to how they intend to deliver value to their owners, usually by identifying some social need and satisfying that need in exchange for value.
The business is a helpful abstraction layered over the top of all these people doing the actual work. It's useful as long as it keeps the lights on. When it stops doing that the community has the right and the responsibility to move the work product of the huge quantity of people actually doing the thing here somewhere else.
The reason we created "corporations" as a concept was not simply to have a vehicle to make as much money as possible, any way possible. It was to serve society by providing services and making products, which would then be sold, and, if they were good enough, would make the company a profit.
This idea that no business should ever be expected to do anything but what makes them the most money the fastest is toxic and is ruining our economy and our society.
We may have been duped by a company's lies, of course. Seems like they've committed a mix of copyright infringement and fraud in that case.
That's exactly what moderation is for, checking, questioning, etc, its not an argument against AI-generated content.
There seems to be an emotional reaction, but people will still value the highest quality content, whatever its provenance.
If the argument is that the workload will be too high, well make that argument - don't sidetrack with misleading and idealistic appeals to emotion.
If the latter is done based on a lie, then you cant align your “commercial purpose” and people who fulfill it..
Workers taking back some of that control is a great thing.