alt Hacker News> That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional?
The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than employees and it's much easier for drama and disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences other than losing an unpaid position, particularly if anonymity is in the mix.
Volunteers can be great but on average they're going to be far harder to manage and far more fickle than employees.
Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing.
What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability.
Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking seems to dominate discourse.