“Note, the problem here isn’t the ask. We do asks in entrepreneur-topia all the time. The problem is the lack of dealcraft: the asks are asymmetrically favouring the asker, and only offer vague lipservice-waving-towards-nice-things as return.”
I want to talk about this just a bit. If I’ve missed a comment that also addresses the same point, I apologize.
So, yes, asks are super common in the culture you’re in. But in other cultures—specifically those that are more guess oriented—it’s actually really difficult to grow negotiation skills. I’d caution strongly against taking a lack of ability in these areas as some sort of strong indication of a person being a “parasite” or having some other baked-in personality type issue. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a problem, just that I don’t know that this piece of evidence is especially strong given how rare it is to find good examples of tell (or even ask) culture in large portions of the country/internet.
If you’re concerned with the lack of dealcraft that comes from newbies, then knowing good resources to point them towards—or offering to be a source of practice in short, low-cost scenarios—may be a more effective way of dealing with this. This will also give you an opportunity to observe how folks respond to those opportunities, which may give you stronger evidence to use to actually identify the parasites/moochers/insert-preferred-term-here that do filter in (because I agree that this is also a thing that happens).
Thanks for your reply and the additional clarification of your original point.
I certainly am not seeking additional identifying information. For one, it would do me no good as I don’t have the local context knowledge to map it to anything anyway. Secondly, the gist of my initial comment was really more responding to the sense that taking a few examples and generalizing them to a larger group of people seemed inadvisable to me.
Along those same lines, I’m still really hesitant to get behind a statement that strongly implies that all well-intentioned newbies will start poorly negotiating in only one way (or one set of ways), and that anyone who starts negotiating poorly in a different or particular way (or set of ways) is obviously doing so from a place of poor intentions. The more visibility and reach this community has, the more diversity we’re going to see in the new people who are finding it. And in the ways of communication they’ve learned are effective and acceptable. Additionally, not every newbie who comes into the community is ready or able to identify culture differences as the source of the problems they’re encountering. Troubleshooting is its own skillset.
It also feels really important to me to point out that—if we’re going to encourage people to ask and to practice asking (both of which are necessary in order to actually improve our asking and negotiating skills) then it creates some counter productive incentives if we then turn around and say things like “oh but folks who are asking in these particular ways are clearly a parasite.”
While I agree that the examples you give of how a parasite might ask for something (or the scenarios they propose) don’t look like particularly good deals… I still don’t understand how this particular kind of ask is an indication of some sort of inherent parasitic nature the part of the asker. If we’re going to create or maintain a culture where asking is an OK thing to do, then part of the underlying assumptions that go into it are that the other person is free to say “No.”
To be completely fair, this is a legitimately difficult situation. In your initial comment you pointed out that one of the indicators you were looking at was the fact that these asks are primarily going towards newer folks (who may not be comfortable with ask/tell culture and who may feel obligated to say yes.) Which makes me think that perhaps the educational thrust I suggested initially was lacking in some key areas.
Perhaps—in addition to offering resources to new folks who want to learn how to ask effectively and responsibly—it would also be a really good idea to also include resources on things like how to say No/ how to be comfortable saying No, and—also really important for those coming from guess cultures—how to gracefully receive No.
I don’t know that this is so much a solution for any particular individuals who are already here as it is a set-up for new people coming in that seems to give space for folks to learn the skills needed to not fall into a pattern of behavior that might be read as parasitic—before passing judgement on whether or not they are parasites.