craigslist_Craigslist，Wikipedia和丰富经济

craigslist

You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

你以前听过也许你甚至已经说过了。 “没有免费的午餐之类的东西。”

“You can’t get something for nothing.”

“你不能一无所获。”

“Somebody has to pay.”

“有人必须付钱。”

People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion.

人们满怀信心地背诵这些说法，好像他们在引用牛顿运动定律一样。

But history has shown: you often can get something for basically nothing.

但是历史表明：您通常可以一无所获。

And even when somebody has to pay, that somebody doesn’t have to be you, and the amount doesn’t have to be very much at all.

即使有人要付款，也不必一定是你，而且金额也不必太多。

In some cases, the benefits so vastly outweigh the costs that it is — for all practical intents and purposes — a free lunch.

在某些情况下，就所有实际意图和目的而言，收益远远超过其成本，因此，免费午餐。

我们如何从地球的表面根除脊髓灰质炎 (How we eradicated Polio from the face of the Earth)

In the early 1950s, the US was recovering from its worst Polio epidemic ever. Thousands of children died from this virus, and many more suffered life-long paralysis.

在1950年代初期，美国正从有史以来最严重的脊髓灰质炎流行中恢复。成千上万的儿童死于这种病毒，还有更多的人终生瘫痪。

No one was safe from this horrible disease. Even US president Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted it at age 39. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

没有人可以避免这种可怕的疾病。甚至美国总统富兰克林·罗斯福(Franklin D. Roosevelt)都在39岁时患了这种病。他一生都坐在轮椅上度过。

Enter Jonas Salk, a medical researcher who had mainly studied flu viruses before turning his efforts toward Polio.

请输入医学研究人员乔纳斯·萨尔克(Jonas Salk)，他主要研究流感病毒，然后才转向脊髓灰质炎。

Dr. Salk spent 7 years assembling a team of researchers and working to develop a Polio vaccine.

Salk博士花了7年时间组建了一个研究团队，并致力于开发脊髓灰质炎疫苗。

He conducted the most extensive field test ever, involving what historian Bill O’Neal says were “20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers.”

他进行了有史以来最广泛的现场测试，涉及的历史学家比尔·奥尼尔说：“ 20,000名医师和公共卫生官员，64,000名学校人员和22万名志愿者。”

The vaccine was a success. So Dr. Salk set to work immunizing everyone on Earth. He pushed the marginal costs of the Polio vaccine as low as possible — to just the raw materials necessary — by forgoing any financial benefits his intellectual property would have brought him.

疫苗很成功。因此，索尔克博士着手为地球上的所有人免疫。通过放弃他的知识产权将给他带来的任何经济利益，他将脊髓灰质炎疫苗的边际成本尽可能地降低了，仅降低了所需的原材料。

When asked about his patent, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

当被问及他的专利时，他说：“没有专利。你能给太阳晒太阳吗？”

Dr. Salk stared down a massive problem and threw himself into it with everything he could, without any aspiration for personal gain. And in the process, he and his colleagues basically wiped out one of the worst diseases ever.

Salk博士凝视着一个巨大的问题，并竭尽所能地投入其中，而没有任何谋求个人利益的愿望。在此过程中，他和他的同事基本上清除了有史以来最严重的疾病之一。

Today, everyone’s life is better off as a direct result of this one massive free lunch.

如今，这一免费午餐的直接结果就是使每个人的生活都变得更好。

“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.” —Dr. Jonas Salk

“做得好的工作的回报是做更多事情的机会。” 博士乔纳斯·索尔克(Jonas Salk)

免费午餐很重要 (Free lunches are important)

Before I run through some modern-day examples of free lunches, let me give you some background on myself, and why the notion of a free lunch is so important to me.

在介绍一些免费午餐的现代例子之前，让我先介绍一下自己的背景，以及为什么免费午餐的概念对我如此重要。

I run a nonprofit, open source community where you can learn to code, practice by building software for nonprofits, then get a job as a developer. Thousands of people have gotten developer jobs so far. And it’s free.

我管理着一个非营利性开源社区，您可以在其中学习编码，通过为非营利性组织构建软件来进行实践，然后获得开发人员的工作。到目前为止，已有成千上万人获得了开发人员的工作。而且是免费的。

I was so committed to the idea of it being free that I put the word “free” in the name.

我非常致力于免费，因此我在名称中加上了“免费”一词。

Free can mean both libre — free as in free speech, and gratis — free as in free beer. Just like the “free” in “Free Open Source Software” (FOSS), the “free” in “freeCodeCamp” means both of these.

自由既可以表示自由 (如言论自由)，又可以免费 (如免费啤酒一样)。就像“免费开源软件”(FOSS)中的“免费”一样，“ freeCodeCamp”中的“免费”意味着这两者。

But still, every day I encounter people who are skeptical. They tell me they don’t use freeCodeCamp because “it sounds too good to be true.”

但是仍然，每天我都会遇到怀疑的人。他们告诉我他们不使用freeCodeCamp，因为“听起来太好了，难以置信。”

“There’s no way all this can be free,” they say. “I’ll sign up and give you my email address, and only then will I find out that I need to pay $20 a month, right?” Or: “You’re free for now, but soon you’ll throw up ads and paywalls, like everybody else does.”

他们说：“不可能所有这些都是免费的。” “我注册并给我我的电子邮件地址，然后我才知道我需要每月支付20美元，对吗？” 或者：“您现在有空，但很快您就会像其他所有人一样扔广告和收费墙。”

Well, I’ve said this publicly a hundred times, and I’ll say it publicly again: freeCodeCamp will always be free.

好吧，我已经公开说过一百遍了，我会再公开说一遍： freeCodeCamp将永远是免费的。

We operate on the fringe of capitalism. The frontier where marginal costs asymptotically approach zero, and the very laws of classical economics begin to unravel. A place called the abundance economy.

我们在资本主义边缘工作。边际成本渐近趋近于零的边界，古典经济学的法则开始瓦解。一个叫做富裕经济的地方。

And we’re not alone.

而且我们并不孤单。

lichess.org的低开销工程 (Low overhead engineering with lichess.org)

Meet Thibault Duplessis, the founder of lichess.org — the second most popular chess website on the planet.

认识lichess.org的创始人Thibault Duplessis，这是地球上第二受欢迎的国际象棋网站。

As of a year ago, lichess had 78,000 unique daily visitors, who play a total of 260,000 games of chess each day.

一年前，巫妖节每天有78,000名独立访客，每天共下棋260,000场棋。

Thibault has no employees. He doesn’t even work on lichess full-time. He still has a job at a development consultancy.

Thibault没有员工。他甚至没有专职从事巫妖节的工作。他仍然在开发咨询公司工作。

Lichess’s main competitor, Chess.com, is a privately-held behemoth that makes millions of dollars each year off of banner ads and premium membership up-sells, then spends that money acquiring their competition.

Lichess的主要竞争对手Chess.com是一家私营巨头，每年通过横幅广告和高级会员销售赚取数百万美元，然后用这些钱来赢得竞争。

Contrast this with Thibault, who has open-sourced lichess’s server code. He has promised that lichess will be free forever, and that it will never show ads.

与此形成鲜明对比的是Thibault，后者拥有lichess的服务器代码的开源代码。他曾承诺，巫妖将永远免费，并且永远不会展示广告。

But wait — how can he do this?

但是，等等-他该怎么做？

Because of the nature of modern web applications, and the economics of their near-zero marginal costs.

由于现代Web应用程序的性质以及其近乎零的边际成本的经济性。

Despite lichess’s complexity — and the scale at which it operates — Thibault’s server costs are a mere $416 a month.

尽管Lichess的复杂性及其运行规模，Thibault的服务器成本仅为每月416美元。

This cost is covered by merchandise and donations from his grateful users, who increasingly include some of the best chess players in the world.

这笔费用由他感激不尽的用户的商品和捐赠来支付，这些用户和用户越来越多，其中包括世界上最好的棋手。

Craigslist如何通过仅向0.1％的用户收费来覆盖成本 (How Craigslist covers costs by charging only 0.1% of its users)

Remember classifieds?

还记得分类吗？

People used to pay a dollar per word for tiny ads that appeared in the backs of newspapers, sandwiched between other ads.

人们过去常常为每个出现在报纸背面的微型广告(每个广告夹在中间)支付每个词一个美元的费用。

Then, 20 years ago, Craigslist utterly disrupted classifieds. They provided a directory of ads online, for free.

然后，在20年前，Craigslist彻底破坏了分类广告。他们免费提供了在线广告目录。

It was searchable. You could use as many words as you wanted, and include pictures. You could repost your ads as many times as you wanted, in as many nearby cities as you wanted.

它是可搜索的。您可以根据需要使用任意数量的单词，并包含图片。您可以根据需要在附近的多个城市中多次发布广告。

But if placing ads on Craigslist was free, how did Craigslist make money?

但是，如果在Craigslist上投放广告是免费的，Craigslist是如何赚钱的？

Well, if you asked a random Craigslist user, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. Most people just assume that Craigslist is a nonprofit, supported by donations or something.

好吧，如果您问随机的Craigslist用户，他们可能无法告诉您。大多数人只是认为Craigslist是非营利组织，得到捐赠或其他支持。

But Craigslist made $400 million last year.

但克雷格斯利斯特去年赚了4亿美元。

They did it by charging to post in a few key categories within a few key cities. If you want to list an apartment in New York City, or a job in San Francisco, you have to pay Craigslist a small fee.

他们通过收费在几个主要城市的几个主要类别中发布来做到这一点。如果要列出纽约市的公寓或旧金山的工作，则必须向Craigslist支付少量费用。

This means that less than one in a thousand people who use Craigslist actually pay any money to do so. Those real estate agents in New York City and those recruiters in San Francisco are paying for everyone else’s free lunch.

这意味着只有不到千分之一的使用Craigslist的人为此支付了任何费用。纽约市的那些房地产经纪人和旧金山的那些招聘人员正在为其他人的免费午餐付费。

Craigslist doesn’t have investors. It keeps things simple. It has a small team of about 40 people.

Craigslist没有投资者。它使事情变得简单。它有一个大约40人的小团队。

Craig still works at Craigslist. He handed over the role of CEO to his long-time friend so he could focus on doing what he loves: providing support for Craigslist users around the world.

Craig仍在Craigslist工作。他将CEO的职位移交给了他的老朋友，这样他就可以专注于做自己喜欢的事情：为全球Craigslist用户提供支持。

Like the other people mentioned in this article, he doesn’t seem to care about money. From what I can tell, he donates most of his money through his charity CraigConnects. And he spends his downtime advocating for causes he cares about, like supporting veterans and helping more women start their careers in tech.

像本文提到的其他人一样，他似乎并不在乎钱。据我所知，他通过慈善机构CraigConnects捐赠了大部分资金。而且，他将自己的业余时间用于提倡自己关心的事业，例如支持退伍军人并帮助更多的女性开始从事科技职业。

维基百科的众包贡献 (Crowd-sourcing contributions with Wikipedia)

Before Wikipedia, the most popular encyclopedia was written by paid experts, and printed in massive books. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was so expensive that they wouldn’t even tell you its price in their TV spots. (It cost $1,400.)

在维基百科之前，最受欢迎的百科全书是由付费专家撰写的，并印在大量书籍中。大英百科全书是如此昂贵，以至于他们甚至都不会在电视节目中告诉您它的价格。 (费用为1,400美元。)

Jimmy Wales — Wikipedia’s visionary leader — had a better idea. He leveraged the power of the internet and the wisdom of volunteer contributors. And he made it free.

维基百科的远见卓识的领袖吉米·威尔士(Jimmy Wales)有一个更好的主意。他利用互联网的力量和志愿者的智慧。而且他免费了。

The number of volunteer-contributed articles on Wikipedia exploded. It quickly surpassed traditional encyclopedias in the scope of its content.

维基百科上志愿者提供的文章数量激增。它的内容范围很快超过了传统的百科全书。

Instead of waiting for a new physical edition to hit the press, Wikipedia editors could instantly publish updates to articles. Wikipedia was so up-to-date that many people started using it for news on current events.

维基百科的编辑者不必等待发布新的物理版本，而可以立即发布文章的更新。维基百科是最新的，以至于许多人开始将其用于时事新闻。

Traditional encyclopedias were quickly backed into a corner. They were paying expert writers and editors to create their content. Surely this resulted in more accurate information than Wikipedia’s volunteer-driven free-for-all.

传统百科全书很快就陷入困境。他们付钱给专业作家和编辑来创建他们的内容。当然，这导致了比Wikipedia的自愿者免费提供的信息更准确的信息。

But in 2005, a major academic journal published an analysis comparing the factual accuracy of Wikipedia versus the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It found:

但是在2005年，一家主要的学术期刊发表了一项分析，比较了Wikipedia和Encyclopaedia Britannica的事实准确性。发现：

“Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.” — The abstract from Nature’s analysis
“一项自然调查发现，吉米·威尔士(Jimmy Wales)的Wikipedia在科学条目的准确性方面与不列颠尼加非常接近。” —自然界的分析摘要

In a last-ditch effort, The Encyclopaedia Britannica pushed back, but Nature upheld its finding.

在最后的努力下，大英百科全书推迟了，但《自然》坚持了这一发现。

This was the final blow to the encyclopedia industry, which had flourished for decades by selling stacks of books door-to-door to guilty parents.

这是对百科全书业的最后一击，几十年来，百科全书业通过挨家挨户向有罪的父母出售书本而繁荣起来。

A decade later, Wikipedia is now the 6th most visited website on the planet. And covers its operating costs through more than $70 million in donations each year from grateful patrons.

十年后，维基百科现已成为全球访问量排名第六的网站。并通过每年感谢客户的捐款超过7,000万美元来支付其运营成本。

But despite all of Jimmy’s accomplishments, people seem to be much more preoccupied with his money. Or rather, his lack-there-of.

但是，尽管吉米取得了所有的成就，但人们似乎更加关注他的钱。或者说，他缺乏。

Here’s what you get when you type “Jimmy Wales net worth” into Google:

在Google中输入“吉米·威尔士的净资产”后，会得到以下结果：

Below this result, Google shows you pictures of people who started other large websites. Each of them has a net worth that’s five orders of magnitude larger than Jimmy’s paltry $1 million.

在此结果之下，Google为您显示了创办其他大型网站的人的照片。他们每个人的净资产都比吉米微不足道的100万美元高出五个数量级 。

People have a hard time accepting that someone would set out to build something as important as Wikipedia without bothering to make money out of it.

人们很难接受有人会着手构建与Wikipedia一样重要的内容，而又不花心思从中赚钱。

One person went so far as to ask straight up on Quora: “Is Jimmy Wales rich?”

一个人竟然直截了当地问Quora ：“吉米·威尔士有钱吗？”

Jimmy responded:

吉米回答：

“By any sane standard of measurement, yes, of course I’m rich. Nearly half of the people on earth live on less than $2 a day. I spend more than that on my cellphone bill.”

“按照任何理智的衡量标准，是的，我当然很富有。地球上将近一半的人每天的生活费不足2美元。我花在手机账单上的钱比这还多。”

生活比金钱更重要。 (There’s so much more to life than money.)

Why are people so preoccupied by money, and the net worth of famous people? Because they’re operating in a scarcity mindset.

为什么人们如此着迷于金钱和名人的净资产？因为他们的工作是稀缺的心态 。

They are so preoccupied by the risk of not having enough that they can’t see the real risk: missing out on the potential for so much more.

他们被精力不足的风险所困扰，以至于看不到真正的风险：错失了更多的潜力。

The traditional scarcity mindset approach to creating value at scale goes something like this:

传统的稀缺性思维定势方法可以大规模创造价值，如下所示：

Figure out a problem you can solve for a large number of people
找出一个可以解决很多人的问题

2a. If people will pay for your product, sell it to them, then re-invest the profits into growing your business (bootstrapping)

2a。如果人们愿意为您的产品付款，然后将其出售给他们，然后将利润再投资用于发展您的业务(自举)

2b. If your solution isn’t something people will pay for, raise a bunch of venture capital to fund development. Once it’s big enough, make money some other way — usually by selling ads.

2b。如果您的解决方案不是人们会花钱买的，请筹集大量风险投资来资助开发。一旦足够大，就可以通过其他方式赚钱-通常通过出售广告来赚钱。

But there’s an alternative. An abundance mindset.

但是还有另一种选择。 丰富的心态 。

This approach shrugs off concerns for basic needs (worst case scenario, I have to get a job in fast food) and instead focuses on upside potential.

这种方法摆脱了对基本需求的担忧(最坏的情况是，我必须在快餐行业找到一份工作)，而将精力集中在上升潜力上。

When you apply an abundance mindset, you approach problems from a different perspective. You try to identify opportunities for free lunches.

当您运用丰富的心态时，您会从不同的角度来处理问题。您尝试确定免费午餐的机会。

Your approach to creating value at scale will look something more like this:

您的大规模创造价值的方法将看起来像这样：

Figure out a problem you can solve for a large number of people
找出一个可以解决很多人的问题
Keep costs low, fund development yourself, and ask for donations, sell merchandise, or find a few users with deep pockets who can subsidize everyone else.
保持低廉的成本，为自己的发展筹集资金，要求捐款，出售商品或寻找一些财力雄厚的用户可以补贴其他所有人。

This is how all of these organizations I’ve discussed here operate. And this is how they can always be free.

这就是我在这里讨论的所有这些组织的运作方式。这就是他们永远可以自由的方式。