"free" or "immaterial" labor performed by users of Web 2.0 platforms (sometimes referred to as "playbor"), while later analyses served to critique the "crowd fleecing" of digital laborers by microtask labor-brokerages such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower.

In 2014, the digital labor discourse shifted to the sharing economy, resulting in an increase in both academic and media attention to the practices