— SteemCN

Give us bread, but give us roses.

I'm kind of shocked by the heat that this post is generating and I don't want to escalate the discussion into a more defensive place. But I believe that @tmaust has raised some necessary, if uncomfortable, questions about the issues of fair compensation and the ethical/practical sustainability of this project as it currently stands as a model for a more widespread funding strategy. He's laid out a reasonable argument and argues his point in reference to established professional ethics standards within the public history field.

Part of our job as public historians is to pose tough and thorny questions of our own work and that of our colleagues; evaluative self-reflection is a natural outcome of the advanced training in critical thinking for which we are going to graduate school to attain in the first place. The point of an experiment is to identify what works and what doesn't. The next iteration will look different, and the next after that further still. I don't see @tmaust disputing that anywhere.

I don't mean to come off as defensive. I do mean to challenge assumptions when they are (in my opinion) off target. Yes, it's important "to raise difficult questions about fair compensation and the ethical/practical sustainability of this project" but I disagree with @tmaust's assumption that the use of Steemit would necessarily fall to unpaid interns. (I'm all for banning unpaid internships as unethical and bad practice.) Burdening the use of Steemit with the practice of unpaid internships is not giving the former its due.

You are right that my assumption is just that: an assumption. A cultural institution with a well -developed social media presence could use Steemit and pay someone a living wage. I worry that they transitional period--the proof-of-concept--would rely on unpaid or underpaid content creators.

RE: Fair Wages, or Why Steemit Isn't Right for Cultural Institutions...Yet.

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