If you want to revolt against people working for free when they should be paid, come see what some of the "interns" in NYC have to do in journalism and fashion (and even more industries now there are no jobs out there)
The LinkedIn translators wouldn't have gotten any of that. It's one thing to sample a career without pay, and another to do a job for free.
Are you just as upset about people fostering rescue animals for free? Why aren't people outraged that they aren't paid.
How can you decide the motivations for someone who wants to volunteer their time to do this?
1. Because its unethical. 2. Because its bad for society. There is a reason minimum wages and employement laws exist.
Minimum wage and unionization laws exist to protect certain laborers at the expense of lower skilled labor.
Come to think of it, translation is a classic market for lemons, isn't it. The people who need it the most are the least capable of assessing the quality of the deliverables, which is why everyone here has heard of All Your Base Are Belong To Us. This results in both people paying absurd amounts of money for mediocre translation and, hmm, large companies thinking that their crowdsourced translation presents their company in the best possible light.
There's so many ways a crowdsourcing solution like this can go wrong. I wish I could show you a concrete example but I don't have any good examples of Japanese businesses that used the technique off the top of my head. If you guys want I can dredge up an example or two from Facebook or whatever, but I'm not quite as plugged into the Japanese Internet so I miss most of the inevitable snickering.
And it's a common scam in the industry (less so now that we congregate online) to take a document, break it up into chunks, then send each chunk to a freelancer as a "translation test" to be done free of charge. I think this LinkedIn thing hit some people that way.
But yeah; mostly, this is one of those sound and fury things.
If you are going to try to crowdsource something, you don't wave it in the face of the paid professionals. It's like asking the AIGA board if they'd like to do spec work on a redesign of MySpace.
If I was the PM, and I wanted to to take advantage of the fact that LinkedIn knows it has thousands of translators, I would have queried the pool to recommend someone else to translate. That's a process story that Facebook (or Twitter or whoever) can't match.
You can't please everyone, and for every "enraged" person, who did the equivalent of signing an online petition, you have others who are glad to help and make your product better.
So you as a product manager, would choose to add $200-300K in expenses(for those professional translation services), just to appease a tiny percentage of users?
Out of those 300 people, how many do you think LinkedIn will lose as users? I'm thinking none. So in the end, they lost nothing, and saved a ton of money.
I didn't hear anyone bitching when facebook pretty much did the same thing...at least LinkedIn is offering some compensation.
