Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds.
Interesting if that’s really true, given how prison labor being slavery is pretty much how it works otherwise.
I’d love to know how fair-market the wages are, becuase I somehow suspect that:
- They’re way lower than someone not in prison would get paid and
- The benefits don’t exist (no PTO, no insurance, no 401k, etc.) and
- The coercive incentives of being able to report your employee to their guards would drive all sorts of abuses
This reads to me as a feel-good whitewashing piece so fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’, but perhaps I’m wrong.
$5 says the problem is the ad revenue they were living on has dried up and/or dramatically shrunk.
This has happened to a LOT of sites, and a more niche site like newgrounds probably doesn’t command high rates, so they have to figure out how to fund themselves now.
Edit: Also, I don’t think sites asking you to donate/pay for features is “enshittification”. If anything, getting revenue from you, the user, is a hard counter to enshittification.
Enshittification is exploiting you for the benefit of capital: you become the product, and are pimped out to anyone who wants to pay.
If you’re the one paying for the service, you’re maintaining the relationship as a customer, and you keep the power in that dynamic, which is a power ‘free users’ on enshittified platforms don’t have: you can take your money and leave, and that will actually hurt them.
This isn’t globally true, of course - what is? - but telling you they need money to keep the site up and offer you a method to pay and provide something for your money is very very honest compared to what most of big tech pulls.