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Comment by nightpool | Hacker News Reader

Actually, there hasn't been any changes to the amount of content on Genius, we (the community) are just presenting it better! And while Genius has, off the top of my head, about 20 employees (including 9 engineers), they have 150+ community moderators that oversee the site's community and hundreds of community editors that are trusted with accepting and editing the site's annotations. Genius isn't a small project!

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>'...they have 150+ community moderators that oversee the site's community and hundreds of community editors that are trusted with accepting and editing the site's annotations...'

Are these people paid anything?

Also, isn't 'project' generally suggestive of something a bit more open than a VC-funded startup?

No, no-one except the paid employees are paid. I mean, I suppose you could say that we're all getting duped into providing value to a company, but I truly believe in the strength of the Rap Genius mission, and I don't think that that mission is irreconcilable with a for-profit company either—look at StackOverflow, for example. They too are very heavily community dependent, and have many contributors that don't get paid, but still provide the backbone of the site.

what about the "strength of the Rap Genius Mission" makes you believe in giving hours of your time to them for free? When they have some kind of an exit with this product you will get nothing, they will get a fortune.

I don't understand you.

there is more to life than money. some people value being part of a community, helping others or creating their identity enough to spend lots of time on it.

money is a simplistic proxy for adding value to the world, try understanding value instead of money and you might get richer yourself.

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