The scope for auto-generated "spins" and "spam" and "drivel" seems to me potentially massively higher in imagery and soundtracks because it is so very easy to generate trillions upon trillions of images, as compared to generating trillions upon trillions of text articles that are grammatically correct and actually seem to have something to convey.
(For sound for example one could set oodles of noisemaking models moving around making noises, maybe in reaction to each other, or you could run Battle for Wesnoth with sound and record the soudns of a massive battle, and by varying which units you deploy you'd get different soundtracks, so you could make a track of elves versus goblins, another goblins versus loyalists, and so on and so on and so on.)
I was wondering about this for photography. Like if someone posted ten pictures of different angles of their lamp... (in such a way that was useful or artistic to no one). I think it would require a pretty big dedicated staff to review submissions, or maybe an application process for contributors who can prove they produce real content, so not practical right now.
Though admittedly maybe I just have not been following the development of constructive grammars, article spinners and suchlike spammer-tools closely enough lately. Is it still the case that when you generate trillions of articles using a constructive grammar the resulting articles seem to somehow lack internal sense and consistency and such?
Far as I know, yes.
I think the CC BY-SA license and opensource are highly compatible concepts, but they're not strictly the same thing. There might be a demand for open-source voice synthesizers and that is a very different project than human generated content that is not locked away by copyright. Both are valid, and the degree of their implementation will depend on the demand.
Well we already have, in the software development side of things, a distinction between "any old crap you choose to come up with" and "stuff we actually need".
So maybe we could do the same with other media?
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That's the tricky part with 'no notability requirements.' Where's the line drawn for 'what we need' and how is it determined? For instance, a lot of really good quality storytelling in various media ISN'T popular (indie films, live storytellings, self-published books), and a lot of crap (helloooo many hollywood movies) IS really popular, so popularity (for instance) is not necessarily a reliable criteria.
Actually it is already maybe not only in programming, but in "being a developer of free open source stuff" in general.
In general you have to be a person who works at least ten hours per week on free open source stuff in order to qualify as a developer to get onto the receivers list.
(That is, in order to get one "share".)
Is it one share per ten hours?
In fact it seems to me that ideally we should at some point no longer need to pay authors by the word, because, hopefully, we will eventually be able to do authors the same way we do any other developers of free open source software, which is to say, if we find a good author who habitually as a lifestyle spends ten hours per week creating free open source stuff they should be able to get onto the receivers list as a developer of free open source stuff.
Notice that they get the same one share regardless of whether they only spend the absolute minimum - ten hours per week - working on such stuff or they do such stuff 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week or whatever.
The idea was we are looking for those people who already naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.
This intrigues me, because ideally I think you're right that the audience should be people who 'naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.' Even within that model there could be room for one-time or not-that-often contributors.
I've got 200k + word I could *conceivably* post on Devtome, but I won't, because it's not polished, or not finished. I'll post it when it's ready. I care about creating quality writing. I'm really passionate about gift economies and openness, so in spirit I really liked free culture licenses, but I clung to the non-commercial clause out of fear of abuse. Investigating Devtome and looking at Sita Sings the Blues
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/ convinced me to put my licensing in line with my beliefs. So I spend 40 + hours a week writing that will now all be published under CC BY-SA. I think all those elements make it natural for me to gravitate toward Devtome.
I think a ton of other writers would, too, once they got over their hangups about copyright (which is rampant in the writer world, for a number of reasons, some of which are they they *care* about and *value* what they are producing, but also hubris around 'originality'), and were able to see that they can meet their material needs with Devcoin. Devtome has attracted a few of those, but also a lot of people who are fine with putting out 'open source' material because they *don't* care about what they're producing.
The Devtome model as it stands now isn't perfect, but it's a place to start.
How would you propose shifting it to paying ongoing writing 'developers'? I think you'd need to wait to do it until you had a stable of committed, high quality authors.