Your lol is misinformed. ACM and IEEE produce and print actual dead-tree journals. This means selecting a fixed number of articles which are consistently formatted by an editorial process. Additionally, [edited to qualify: some but not all] IEEE Associate Editors are paid positions. Arxiv is not doing this.
We can argue/debate about what is the value-add (and precise workflow difference) of the IEEE editorial process vs. arxiv, but there is a difference.
Like the comment you responded to, I'm not defending the precise differential. I'm a past IEEE member (and author, and reviewer) and found their membership fees excessive.
Re:ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
by chrisseaton on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @08:46PM
(#22113781)
> Your lol is misinformed.
In every ACM review committee I’ve participated in, it’s just volunteer members of the community emailing other other and using open source software to coordinate reviews.
I think all of the ACM conferences I contribute to have stopped actually printing physical proceedings. The consistent formatting is by a LaTeX document class, with an automated system that checks for bad fonts, text going into the margin, etc. The PDF that ends up in the Digital Library is the one the author submits (possibly with a watermark or stamp applied). I don't know if there is a small amount of ACM-provided human labour employed somewhere, but mostly they just provide a small amount of automation.
Lol that’s done by volunteer community members as well. It literally is free to the ACM (but the people are paid to do it by their institutions as part of their jobs.)