Open source software may be a good model to look at. People contribute bc they want to, regardless of any monetary remuneration.

But it's hard, and a for-profit corporation can often move forward more quickly to develop an objectively better project. Except even though they *could", they (usually) don't, and really they have zero reason to, bc their goal is to make a profit, not a product. Reddit vs. Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/etc. is one such example.

But it gets complicated bc of all the counterexamples, like at one time Google really was awesome, and free, so most of the open source projects did not push hard to replace it, bc it worked so well for so many. Similar to Lemmy I suppose - before the Rexit it had existed for many years, but it wasn't until that shakeup that it was propelled forward extremely quickly by the influx of developers, e.g. who made the front end apps. Before that, the Reddit experience was fairly good even if not great, so not as many people bothered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

@Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone when humans have their basic needs all satisfied, and they feel secure and mostly content with life, they naturally become very creative and innovative.

Think about it: if you were not worried about paying rent every month, not worried about medical bills, not worried about where your next meal is coming from, and the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week, what would you do with your abundant free time? You might have kids and devote your life to them, and that is really helpful for perpetuating society. You might be happy to just play video games and watch TV and movies and maybe read fictional novels in all of your free time, and that would be totally OK too.

But a lot of people would get antsy, they would want to find tasks for themselves to perform. They may devote themselves to sport, and become the best players in the world. They may devote themselves to art, and without a free market to satisfy, without a business case to defend the art you make, the art you make would be truly free and likely very innovative. Even in engineering and science, in which some creativity is required to come up with innovative solutions to problems, if you don't have to worry about making things that are marketable, you just want to make things that you think are cool and useful for yourself, it may turn out to be useful for millions of other people.

Look at video game modding as an example. People want to make better things. It's part of our nature. Even today, where they have to devote their free time to it and still work under our exploitative system for money, we have people devoting time equivalent or in some cases even greater than a full time job in order to make amazing high quality mods with no monetary reward for doing so.

If the system supported it, we would see that kind of behavior in all sorts of fields.

Workers are paid fairly equally under capitalsism regardless for each job. There is a "standard rate". The incentives that could exist from the perspective of the worker would remain the same (bonus checks etc) no matter the system (minus a moneyless one).

Also remember is was the USSR who made it to space before any other country. Almost as if hard work is stimulated in many ways - and humans are not only interested in money.

What are you on about? Do you have any idea how much innovation there is under socialism? Just look at the USSR space program and the USSR medical program. The USSR innovated new medical techniques we still use today.

Cuba produced multiple COVID vaccines in the same timeline the USA did and they're under a 60-year international embargo and sanctions regime! China dominates nearly every single hi tech domain in the world, many domains it has all top 10 universities.

Capitalism innovations are new ways of rent seeking. Most of the innovations people actually want and need don't turn a profit. Think about how many billions of dollars are spent on anti-piracy research and development. Think about how many patents are bought in order to stop them from coming to market. Think about how many small startups are bought and killed to prevent competition.

Innovation thrives under the conditions of liberation. The incentives for innovating are inherent in the problem the innovation solves. There is literally no need for profit systems to incentivize innovation.

Money still exists under socialism, you could donate money, code, time, bug reports. You can still sell/buy products in a socialist society too

the government can do contests with prizes/awards for companies or individuals to win.

This is just an idea I've been rolling around in my head...

Make sure every citizens basic needs are met, including but not limited to food, water, shelter, healthcare, etc, and abolish the minimum wage. Then you can truly pay what a job is worth.

There would obviously be a transitional period, and working conditions would have to change to keep people in "shitty" jobs. But I promise you, there are enough people out there who would earn $3 an hour to "flip burgers" if it wasn't under shitty conditions and the threat of homelessness.

Some people would have a natural drive to pursue money/careers, while others just want their basic needs met and enough money for art supplies.