I’m not shitting on volunteers as a class. I’m taking issue with the idea that they are the solution to enterprise level externalities created by profitable corporations. We need people to clean up oil spills, too, but volunteers by themselves can’t (and shouldn’t) do all the work.
There’s volunteer labor and there’s exploitation. A dude running a phpBB forum has earned the right to free beverage from me, in appreciation of their hard work. A person on YouTube working tirelessly to improve the environment for a company that pulls 110 bill in revenue is getting screwed. Different environments call for different levels of moderation, and a company like YouTube has the money to pay for the level of moderation they require.
