But they do have to employ moderators, admins, marketing, sales, software developers, IT... as well as paying for hosting, bandwidth, office space, equipment...
What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader scope?
Good creative content is difficult to incentivise for.
Case in point: SO incentivises for it without payment. Largely through providing an "interesting things to work on" dynamic, with rapid review and improvement of naff responses.
But answers to technical problems (many quite trivial) are a different class than, say, deep investigative reporting, or solving really hard technical problems.
On that last, there's an essay written a few years back on how the current iteration of the Internet seems to incentivise for trivial things, featured on HN. I'll see if I can't track it down.
I won't disagree with anything you've said there. Creative types are always harder to incentivize (just look at us programmers).
But stepping back for a moment and looking at it from a purely financial point of view - if you're working for a company with 500 employees, how will it matter to the bottom line if a portion of them are editors instead of moderators; instead of software developers?
If your goal is to directly incentivise and reward editorial content, then ipso facto, you're failing at your goal.
More broadly, the problem's nontrivial. Good true talent is rare, and even then, inspiration often uneven. It's quite possible for someone to turn out prodigious amounts of content (see Isaac Asimov, say), and even relatively high-quality content (his was good, though IMO uneven). But there are others who produce very few works -- Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein all come to mind.
Incentivising technological creativity has also been quite rocky -- VC-backed startups, IPO exits, patents, state-granted charters, and patronage are among the models attempted. Many tremendously innovative individuals died broke, and the inventors of many of our most valuable creations (fire, agriculture, weaving cloth, smelting metals, writing) are entirely forgotten. Even the roster of great inventors launching the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years ago, shows few who actually prospered by that work -- several died in poverty, others were granted government awards or made money elsewhere, a small handful actually profited directly.
I've just run across Joseph Needham's absolutely stunning 27 volume History of Science and Civilisation in China, which tells the story of Chinese invention dating back literally thousands of years (don't ask for details, as I said, just discovered it, though Needham and the work's Wikipedia pages offer substantial background, and Simon Winchester has a biography of Needham giving more detail). One question I've in mind to take to it is what motivated China's inventors?
Needham himself asked what's eponymously called "the Needham Question": why didn't China, with its tremendous head start, industrialise before the West.
Nit-pick...."moderators" (the ones with the diamonds next to their names) are not employees, they're elected from the community and are unpaid volunteers (I used to be one on SO). There are staff members who have mod diamonds, but they're employed to do other things such as development, community management etc.
Because those things are at different scales. I'm sure there are thousands of hours put into IT and moderation, but there are millions of hours put into content creation. The value of SO almost entirely comes from unpaid volunteers who produce the actual content.
I'm not trying to imply that this is morally wrong. I think parent comment is just trying to say that it puts them into an entirely different class of websites than journalism. They can afford to run on less ad revenue, because the amount of content they produce per employee is much higher.
What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader scope?