No, Google doesn't pay you when you do work for them as a "Local Guide".

That means that there is little incentive to stop people who are paid by entities that have vested interest in manipulating Google Maps information.

No, it's part of the local guides program they run. They'll show you pending edits and you just approve or decline. I don't spent too much time on it, only when I notice and am in the app.

Stack overflow is pretty popular. Although their recent attempt to "be nice to new users" (which wasn't necessary before, and coincides with the quality of answers rapidly approaching that of Quota) suggests that this won't last forever.

Stackoverflow data is free for anyone to download and reuse. Gmaps is a proprietary dataset. Helping people on SO also feels a lot less like working for a tech megacorp for free.

> (which wasn't necessary before, and coincides with the quality of answers rapidly approaching that of Quota)

It was absolutely necessary. It isn't a "meme" that SO community has hostile users. I hand out a lot of votes when browsing SO because so f many people don't really deserve the downvotes.

> coincides with the quality of answers rapidly approaching that of Quota

Do you perceive Quora to have higher or lower quality answers? I'm having trouble parsing what you meant to say.

Pretty sure s/he means lower