Eric was actually talking about this the Rick Emerson Show (rickemerson.com) some time last week. I don't recall which day it was, but he shared the experience with the whole internet reaction to the email snip he posted that AOL subsequently responded to by claiming "oh no, we're not forcing anyone to work for free or be fired!" and then laid off the person who originally sent the email that was snipped from.<p>It was a sad and frustrating story to hear (though amusing and snarky as Eric tends to be, from my limited experience).<p>I'm a big proponent of doing what you love because you love it (like running a forum or BBS or online service or writing) rather than trying to suck every last penny out of something that you can. But when someone else is making every last dime on something while expecting your contribution to be entirely uncompensated, save for "but you'll see your name on a byline!", it is almost downright sickening.<p>Unfortunately, this is a trend on the internet. It seems that fewer places are willing to pay for writers or even photographers, anymore. You should be thankful that your work is going to be used at all and then you can use the fact that someone published your content as leverage to promote yourself into something that does pay, somewhere . . . unless those people want you to work for "ego", too.<p>It's very difficult to justify not paying content creators when you've just made a few hundred million dollars off of the "they should thank me for printing them!" model. Or . . . maybe that's exactly why it's so easy to justify. Why pay when they're giving it to you for free?<p>I'm grateful I never entered one of these industries. I grew up with dreams of being a writer. Then I had dreams of being a radio broadcaster. Then I had dreams of being a video game developer. I went into the world of enterprise software and unix and linux, instead. A world where there is competition, but people aren't practically throwing themselves at you to do the job for free, because it's "fun".