> I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it.

I have this feeling medium is being kept alive on the shoulders of other companies’ marketing teams in an attempt to write thinly-veiled sales pitches disguised as blog posts from a “neutral” 3rd party.

Coupled with the zero-life-experience blogger trope, the signal to noise ratio on medium is practically nil.

There is a strong "thought leadership" vibe.

The signal I’ve started looking for is an above the fold “minutes to read” stat. Sites, like Medium, that have it are practically all worth ignoring because it’s either astroturfing or just navel gazing.

Many static site generators add that stat. I find it useful.

Absolutely agreed, there's a huge difference between a 5 minute article you can quickly read whenever you stumble upon it, and a 30 minute post (like acoup.blog's excellent articles) that you might have to save to read later.

The New York Times has the "x min read" stat listed under articles on its homepage.

Co-ops and partnerships work very well for low capital intensity businesses, and coding is a low capital-intensity business in this day and age. It makes total sense that people are interested in such arrangements, it's not just a matter of wishful thinking.

I don't understand... I work as a software contractor in EU. I don't see a single thing I'm missing by not being in a coop. 5% of my income is a lot of money. For that money I can buy all the accounting and tax advisory services I need with enough money left over to get a Wework All Access membership and even then I'd have a significant portion of the 5% left. Why does it make total sense that people are interested?

I would assume that the benefits are in having coworkers that fill in the gaps in your own business skills. For example: finding clients, invoicing, server maintenance, customer service, training, documentation, implementation consultants. There are a variety of job skills that one person will not have or want to contribute 100% of the time that are valuable jobs for junior or more senior coworkers.

If you are paying someone to do any of these jobs, you are doing it out of income that you've paid taxes on. If they are a part of your cooperative then it comes out of the businesses own funds pretax. There are also incentives to share in other resources, such as buildings, child care and other invisible labor that we normally place little value on.

Also, some cooperative companies will only outsource work to other cooperative groups.

Not to mention the camaraderie of working with people with similar goals in a noncompetitive environment where they value your success.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m not familiar with the space but I wonder if it’s just a matter of elite-ness. Hypothesis: The top 1 or 10 percent of a field are better off in their own, whereas the rest benefit from collective benefits. Another example that comes to mind is Matt Yglesias leaving Vox. He was well paid at Vox but now on his own I’m sure he’s even higher paid and has more freedom etc. I donno just speculating.

>Trainings are given for free in coops? I can't imagine myself or my friends working for free, are you forced to work for free in a coop? As in, would I be forced to give trainings too? I value my time too much for this. Of course I do the occasional free tech talk for my friends/the public, but that's not in any way comparable to a "full" training.

No one said anything about training for free. This was an example of work that needs to be done for a client that you may not want to do yourself. A junior level member of your coop could travel to the client's site and train them on how to use your software, learn from the experience and make valuable ties, while you stay at home and work on more appropriate tasks.

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. Sorry I misunderstood. This is not really something applicable to my line of work (standard software development tasks on a larger project in an agile team managed by the client) but I can imagine some of my friends doing this.

>Why does it make total sense that people are interested?

Because that way you can finance a bunch of useless moochers who "administer your coop". Smells like typical rent seeking.

If you're worried about rent seeking wait till you find out how a traditional business works. The owner of the company takes all the profit, and then pays out a small portion of that profit to the workers doing the work in form of wages.

On the other hand, in a coop the profit is shared fairly amongst the people actually doing the work. It's frankly incredibly that somebody thinks this is a worse model of compensation.

The labor theory of value is approximately true when capital intensity is low, however.

It's never true. It's like a broken clock - it's right 2 times a day. When the conditions are exactly correct, it seems like the labor theory of value is true - but it's not. Consider a simple example - food production. Nothing changes about the labor necessary to produce it but that doesn't mean you won't have to sell your produce way under price (or let it rot) if you and other farmers make too much of it.

The question isn't about the amount of labour needed to produce food, it's regarding who collects the profit from the labour that is done. Not sure what point you were trying to make with food production there.

The labor theory of value has nothing to do with collecting profits and isn't concerned with who gets it. It argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of "socially necessary labor" required to produce it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value)

My point is that value is actually not determined by "socially necessary labor" but by supply and demand, even within a commune. The food you produce will rot if you and others produce too much of it = it has no value, and nobody collects profit (not even in the form of social capital) because everybody lost any possibility of selling for a good price by producing too much.

On the other hand during a shortage people will start valuing food much more than they previously did, gradually paying higher price as they have less of it - again totally disconnected from the "socially necessary labor" required to produce it.

Most importantly - the value of most if not all things is subjective and different based on time, place, etc. Even within a commune - some people simply don't like peppers, so even though you put a lot of work into them they have no value to these people (which will quickly change once there's a food shortage).

Of course it has to do with profits and who gets it. That's the whole context for introducing the theory of value in Kapital, which one of us actually read while the other evidently skimmed a wikipedia page.

Labour theory of value is not in anyway at odds with the idea of supply and demand. In fact, the whole idea of value in Kapital is derived from supply and demand.

The labour theory of value states that the inherent value of a commodity is directly related to the combination of labour and cost of the machinery needed to produce the commodity. This is what acts as the foundation for the value that the market assigns to the commodities. The market value doesn't just appear out of thin air, it's rooted in material costs of production.

To put it bluntly, you have an infantile understanding of the subject you're attempting to debate here.

Kek

Pretty much the quality of discourse I was expecting here. Next time try to stick to opining on topics you actually understand.

Kek

(I bet I read the book more times than you. It's sitting right there on a shelf next to my desk :-))

If you read the book then you'd understand what labour theory of value is. Your comments make it pretty clear that you don't. You literally don't understand how it relates to market. Kek as you say.

True, in a commune or something like that, it does work. I think though once we hit Dunbar's number, then it breaks down and we need a subjective value based market.

Yeah, subjective theory of value brought us the world where a handful of individuals have more wealth than over half the world population, while the rest live in shit.

Industrialization via the profit motive has been the single greatest lever of increasing humanity's quality of life.

The people who say that the rest live in shit in my experience have never been to a third world country and actually lived there. If they did, they'd realize just how shit the first world is.

As long as we have scarcity of goods that must be distributed somehow, communism only works in theory, not in practice.

Edit: Ah, I see, so you're a tankie who grew up in the USSR yet still supports them. Thanks, I have no need to speak to you further.

And proud of it.

> I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it.

You mean the last paragraph where they _volunteer_ to have coaching sessions with people? "Selling" usually implies an exchange of money or an expectation of something in return, but there's no product here – the author is offering their time for free to help others start or join cooperatives. Is it fair to dismiss that as "being sold" something?

I think so. Plenty of companies offer product samples or free services upfront. But even if you think the author has no specific “sales” goal with the article, self-promotion still seems to be its main objective.

> Plenty of companies offer product samples or free services upfront

Sure, but a startup using VC money to offer you something for free is very different from "I will personally volunteer to help you".

Also the entire point of sharing articles is that they're being read, so there isn't any way to avoid implying they're doing "self-promotion" – should people just stop writing and sharing articles?

Sometimes people aren't after some self-serving goal, and I think it's a little dangerous to think everyone is – charities exist. Cooperatives are more ethical businesses because they build democracy into their structure unlike traditional businesses, why would I assume whoever is talking about them isn't just hoping to see more of that in the world? Or do we reduce that to "that's just the author being selfish again"?

I might be inclined to agree with your points if the article weren’t mostly fluff, as stated in my original comment. The reason I read it was because I was genuinely interested in how this specific approach works in practice and how it applies to tech, but there was little actual information and a lot of what seemed like corporate cult-speak.

Perhaps the article is devoid of insightful content to such an extent that we were both forced to interpret its author’s motivations based on our preconceived notions of the idea they’re discussing. You believe they’re genuinely seeking to improve worker’s rights, and it just looks like another hustle to me.

One thing I can say for certain is that I did not get much from the article, and I suspect there will be comments that are shorter yet far more insightful than the article a few hours from now.

I think you're biased against cooperatives which made you uber-critical of the article. I did not find it to be "fluff."

Many of the engineering blogs shared on HN have a "by the way, we are hiring"[0] stinger, or a promotion of the author's startup's product as a solution to the engineering problem described by the post, or if its a benchmark, then the entire post would be promoting their product as the superior product. This article no worse than others wrt self promotion.

0. Maybe not so much now, but perhaps we'll see an uptick of "I'm looking for my next move, if you're hiring, contact me."

Another issue with Medium is that you earn money for your content. The problem with this is it attracts a large bunch of people who have extrinsic motivations. When your goal is monetization, you tend to resort to any trick in the book that will move the numbers.

I find non-monetized content generally to have higher quality than monetized ones. The author is intrinsically motivated to produce quality and there is no other goal other than to share what they have with the world.

A not insignificant portion of HN posts are selling something and not all are related to tech. It's worth having a similar skepticism for other posts, it's eye opening

Visible frustration sometimes counts as violent communication, according to the book.

I used to work for the post office in the early 90s and a couple coworkers got into one of these visible frustration violent communications with the one who started the argument getting two weeks paid leave for ‘stress’.