Prizes leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, frankly.
They are only so efficient because you’re having many people spend their resources on a job that you’re only going to pay a few of them for doing. It makes good sense for the person paying prize money, but that’s part of the reason I tend to avoid competitions where prizes are offered: it feels like it will be a waste of my time. This is apparently an easy way to exploit online artists, too: ask several of them to do your design work for you, and pay only the one you like best. You get better designs, and most of them get a day of unpaid work.
On the other hand, these competitions are fairly small-scale, you’re paying everyone who has an exercise good enough to test, and it’s likely not a waste of mental effort even if I don’t come up with anything spectacular. So I don’t have a particular ethical problem with the SoTW prizes.
Prizes leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, frankly.
They are only so efficient because you’re having many people spend their resources on a job that you’re only going to pay a few of them for doing. It makes good sense for the person paying prize money, but that’s part of the reason I tend to avoid competitions where prizes are offered: it feels like it will be a waste of my time. This is apparently an easy way to exploit online artists, too: ask several of them to do your design work for you, and pay only the one you like best. You get better designs, and most of them get a day of unpaid work.
On the other hand, these competitions are fairly small-scale, you’re paying everyone who has an exercise good enough to test, and it’s likely not a waste of mental effort even if I don’t come up with anything spectacular. So I don’t have a particular ethical problem with the SoTW prizes.