Originally Posted by
Dovster
Frankly, IMHO, it is rather ridiculous for anyone to donate his time to a profit-making corporation. I am certain, of course, that Macy's would love to have volunteer sales help (especially in December), Delta would greatly appreciate having a few hundred people work as FAs for free, and McDonald's would like nothing better than for folks from the neighborhood to clean up each evening.
In fact, these companies wouldn't even complain about giving $25 Starbucks Gift Cards.
I am a mod on a non-travel related forum, run by a business which is smaller than IB, and which has traffic that compares in posting to about the level of the Religious Travel Forum. I am paid $500 a month and have been assured that if the forum ever really takes off my pay will be increased proportionately.
I really could understand it back when Randy owned FT. He was considered a friend by many posters and the forum was not seen (very possibly incorrectly) as a business venture.
Today, it is a completely different story.
Interesting. When the subject of Mod compensation came up the other day, I did a mental exercise of what a stipend should be. Figuring an average workload of a few hours per week doing everything from keeping rabble-rousers in check to deleting spambots, $500/month seemed to be the sweet spot if I wanted to address what someone's billable time may be worth. But looking at the number of Mods on a site the size of FT, that would be a big chunk of change. So if N965VJ.com had a BB big enough for as many Mods that FT does, I would elect to have moderation done inhouse by salaried staff.
At least that's what I would do on the 2011 era interweb stating with a clean slate.
But the commercialization of the net was relatively new in 1998 when FT was started, considering Usenet newsgroups had been around for 15 years already. I recall some Usenet veterans in the mid 90s not particularly pleased with efforts to capitalize the sharing of information, so maybe that's the spirit some see in volunteering their time on commercial sites today. Even when AOL and CompuServe were communities unto themselves (remember when a CompuServe address couldn't email an AOL address?), the only compensation moderators of those places saw was something like free access time.