> What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?
Must the incentive be economic? Facebook provides value to its users through a social incentive. Likewise, the incentive to share an article on HN or Reddit is your Karma score and to engage in a lively discussion on the topic. Neither of the two is economic.
An interesting point that you failed to make when discussing the economics of the situation is the following, regardless of whether or not a user contributes to TripAdvisor or Qype he can still peruse the site. So my question is the following, what incentive does a user have to contribute reviews to TripAdvisor or Qype versus simply reading others' reviews?
As far as the incentive to write a review on TripAdvisor, from personal experience I'd say the overwhelming incentive is to either benefit or stick it to an establishment you visited.
Not to say that financial rewards alone can't work (unless I'm missing something, that seems to be how eHow farms most of their content), but my last company (Revver) focused primarily on rewarding users financially for creating and sharing video content.
It's not the cleanest example because of some of the related implications of that decision: not including copyrighted content for fear of negating DMCA protection, having large media companies uncomfortable with the reward structure around dispersing content freely, etc. While some content creators really treated the endeavor as a business and looked to maximize profits as much as possible, most were really in it for the fame - and Youtube had the built-in audience we couldn't build (especially without stolen, copyrighted work early on).
I still do think there's a happy medium between the two - with fame / competition being the primary motivators and financial rewards being included as bonuses or perks. At Revver we had that priority order reversed, thinking that financial rewards would be big enough motivators to bring traffic and content.
There are lots of reasons people use sites and create content, and I can't think of any case where they are monetary. Even something like Mechanical Turk I believe has a significant non-monetary aspect to it considering the pittance that people make doing it (granted it's supplemental income if they are stuck in a under-utilized desk job all day). The fact is that by boycotting content creation he is just joining the silent majority of people who don't post anything. Even on Facebook where there is pretty much nothing but UGC I suspect the majority never post anything. The question of what motivates people probably has a different answer on every site, and it's certainly worth exploring, but the answer is not to be found in what this guy thinks he deserves.
It's sort of funny how in a few short years there is a growing contingent of people who have gone from fevered excitement over new free services to bitterness over how much those free services are making from their content in just a few short years. But let's examine the economics of the situation. How much profit does Facebook make from a status update? A like? A comment? How much does TripAvisor make from a review? I don't have any numbers, but by any reasonable napkin calculation the economic value of a single user's contribution is just not significant. It's probably less than you would be willing to give a bum on the street. If Facebook makes $1 billion revenue off 500 million users, that makes you worth $2 a year not even counting expenses. Of course all users are not equal, so maybe you're an extremely heavy user and you're worth $10 even after expenses. What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?