Be interested to hear your points and examples.
here's a related example:
http://fairytalesandfolklore.com/I own that site and it's clearly not monetized, however it's seeing a couple thousand hits a month and google wants me to put ads on it. It's sat idle for so long, it was originally developed using google friend-connect in like, 2008 or something.
You can bet I didn't generate any of that content it was all public domain (gutenberg) stuff. But it doesn't matter because gutenberg is unpleasant to use. Take it out and chop it into the pretty bits and present it in a searchable, accessible, easy to read format is work, and it's a service that a couple thousand people per month are appreciating.
I can tell you right now it would be trivial to make a better, nicer, more useful site than devtome - which seems so incredibly hard to manage because it's in a completely wrong tool. It actually pains me to say this (I hate wordpress) but moving from a "wiki" format to ANYTHING With categories and some sorting would be a tremendous improvement. This is the first time in my entire life I've recommended wordpress for something besides a blog.
A nice re-skin of devtome would probably generate enough pageviews to put ads on it. Dumping/ignoring a good part of it would help. getting it out of that wikidiculous format and into some proper order would be the icing on the cake.
And any SEO will tell you that a properly organized, sorted and categorized site with google ads on it would be so much more attractive to both bots and people that soon it would be QUITE PROBABLE for google to start sending people to this commercial site, instead of into the hole of devtome.
And people would appreciate it because while search may be leading people to devtome right now, it's my guess that most of them leave in a hurry when they realize it looks like a giant spam honeypot.
And then all of the people that were happy to "share with the community" will suddenly turn into greedy monsters crying about how their work was STOLEN and it's not FAIR. Even though they were happy to sell it into the public domain it for a few devcoins because they didn't know how to make use of it. Hypocrites.
There's part of the problem,
You don't get to take payment, and then get self righteous about your "sharing" and "Control of your art". You sold it. Not gifted, or contributed, or shared it, you sold it. As weisoq notes it's practically shoved in people's face as they sign away their rights.
But that won't stop the green-eyed monster from coming out now will it?
Maybe I'll do this tomorrow. What the hell. According to unthinking bit devtome itself has plenty of pageviews now. But it's not monetized because he/she "doesn't like U.S. politics" and apparently no one working with devtome can find a non-U.S. advertiser?
There is some basic wrongness here.
This is an interesting alternative idea. I wasn't even thinking about it but this is just off the charts.
Personal proof, indeed. I'm sorry to sound derisive as I see that there are some nice people hoping to achieve good things by throwing their weight behind the devcoin foundation. But really it's a mess. And I suspect that considering the sort of recruiting being done right now there will be a lot of doe-eyed innocent who really didn't think of "taking devcoin for their work" as "selling their work" and are legitimately shocked by this.
Why are you worried about what some "mysterious commercial entity" might do anyways. You're all "contributing" to pay Fin Shaggy's rent and support his hilarious crusade while devtome rots and collapses under it's own weight and lack of even basic management.
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking to get involved with some of the devcoin stuff, the basic ideas behind it sound great. But the community surrounding it is pretty screwed up right now. The more I watch and research the less I want to get involved.
But not because someone might "steal" my work that I got paid to put into the public domain.
