We wrote about Dergice in the New Media Book
With the development of Web 2.0 technologies, the passive consumer of traditional media has been replaced by the prosumer, a subject who both produces and consumes content. We have undertaken this task by examining how Medium and Dergice, two content platforms, have shaped their management strategies, revenue models, and legal frameworks. You can find more details in Chapter 9 of the book “New Media New Concepts,” titled “Digital Platforms and the Prosumer Phenomenon: An Examination of Digital Labour and Structural Dynamics” in Turkish.
In this context, Medium.com, which offers a global revenue model based on subscriptions and reading time, is compared with Dergice.com, a local platform based on advertising and gamification. The research is conducted using a deductive approach, drawing upon Christian Fuchs’ theories of digital labor, Tiziana Terranova’s theories of unpaid labor, and Julian Kücklich’s theories of game-labor.
Click here to access the PDF of the book.
It has been determined that Medium.com transforms its authors into an insecure digital precariat class by constantly putting them under performance pressure through algorithmic governance mechanisms. In contrast, Dergice.com has been found to compensate for labor with status and reputation-focused symbolic capital instead of economic capital by using gamification dynamics such as ranks and badges. Furthermore, it has been assessed that legal regulations such as sui generis database rights transform users’ voluntary labor into capital accumulation by adding it to the platform’s private property.
