The fact remains that moderating forums is labor, and stack exchange receives a lot of value from that labor that the mods themselves don't see a dime of.
I run a forum and there's no shortage of people who would happily volunteer for a mod role.
You have it wrong though: they get plenty of compensation through reputation, clout, and a feeling of power over their peers and being heard and helping out in a community that they love (or some combo of these). That's why they do it. Why is that not a fair trade without money exchanging hands?
Growing up, I used to mow an aging neighbor's lawn because he was basically couch-ridden. It made me feel good to help someone else out. Was I being exploited and should I have demanded payment, or was that just a fair trade that I volunteered for and could quit at any time?
Or look no further than HN. Participating on this forum writing content and enriching YC's coffers is "labor". And our compensation is procrastination and venting and feeling some satisfaction for scrawling our opinions online. If we didn't like that deal, we wouldn't be here.
The thing is, the service and main value that Stack Exchange provides is literally a moderated forum for people to ask and answer questions. Without that moderation, the service would be much less valuable, because it would be full of spam and worthless questions and answers, and less people would use it. This is what drives their revenue and their valuation.
This isn't the case with HN, where the main contribution of the forums to their business is mainly brand recognition.
>I run a forum and there's no shortage of people who would happily volunteer for a mod role.
There's no shortage of people who want to be rulers of a community. Of those, it is always hard to find the ones who are actually fit for that purpose.
Yes, but ...arrgh... they are doing this of their own free will and choice, perhaps because they enjoy it, they increase their social interactions, increase their skills... etc. It seems contrary to the concept of freedom if private parties cannot engage in such a relationship, if each and both so choose.
I'm not saying that the situation is necessarily bad, or that the people who willingly do this for free are suckers. I can't speak for them, and I don't know the conditions that the moderators labor under.
All I'm saying that the situation is still exploitation, no matter how you cut it. More and more businesses derive their main value from unpaid contributors, and it's something that should give us all pause.
The idea behind these laws limit the extent that people can circumvent minimum wage. It also prevents de facto enslavement or indentured servitude, but probably to a lesser degree.
This type of discussion usually comes up in the context of internship positions, where federally an unpaid internship must not displace employees and must provide no value to the employer.
Should we require the elderly to pay their adult children minimum wage for looking after them? Because that is far more like work than being a moderator on a website.
If the elderly person requires the child to wear a tee-shirt with and advert on, which the elderly person earns money off, and the elderly person is getting rich off asking the child to look after them for "good will" then... yeah, they probably should be paid. It's not charity, it's not family, it's exploitation.
