Nobody's saying she should have been earning six figures. But they could certainly have been smart enough to offer her and other prolific quizmakers paid positions with a revenue share upside if they thought they'd get more quizzes as a result. She's 19 and made 700 quizzes for free - she'd have probably thought an entry level wage and a $10k bonus was Buzzfeed being very generous.

> You’ll never get a company to pay six figures for someone they consider a free intern

And yet here they are, having lost that percentage of revenue because they had this mindset. I don't think she needed a six figure salary necessarily, but BF made exactly no attempt to do _anything_. Unlike an unpaid intern, McMahon could have kept doing this indefinitely, not just for three summer months.

It’s human nature, and it happens not just in business. People get up in arms whenever an open source project tries to monetize in some way other than “support”.

Isn’t the whole point of having things like CEOs and shareholder-elected boards of directors, to find people who are good at optimizing for the business’s profits over what their own human natures tell them to do?

Sure, as irrational as that may be, you're right that it's a larger problem to fix that's probably out of scope here.

But the larger point is that economically productive employees in their early career are almost always exploited, so it wouldn't have been hard for Buzzfeed to throw some relatively token amount towards her and have her be over the moon with it. Most college students would love to get $20k for doing something they were procrastinating and doing for free, especially if you package it with an ego-boosting title.