Ask HN: How much compensation would you like from "Hacker Monthly"?

I dont think your first statement is true. Are magazines required to compensate their writers? I don't think that they are, it depends on the license applied to the original content. If there's no license they can only print it if Fair Use applies or copyright is reassigned.

We cannot examine the other issues when the assumptions in your first two sentences are in question.

Pay us in Karma points!

I bought this up in comments two issues ago when one of the authors mentioned that they didn't know there was no free PDF issue any longer.

As I said at the time, you should pay contributors at least a token fee to remove any ambiguity about copyright ownership. There is just far too much that can go wrong with the current system, and you are exposing yourself to liability. Saying 'we do pay the writers for their copyright by giving them a free copy of their own content' is not an answer.

I remember when I used to write a monthly column in a computing magazine I would take a monthly salary of $1 simply to remove any ambiguity about ownership. It was company policy not to accept or publish any content that was free (because it never ended up being free).

You are only one pissed off author away from losing everything, or causing a fuss (they could decide to change their mind for the heck of it, a year later).

It would be very different if you were giving a free PDF edition away and charging for a print edition - that is how most open source works (ie. download for free, pay for a CD)

I don't have a view on the articles that are republished - I think it comes down to the case-by-case situation between the blog post writer and Hacker Monthly (some bloggers are pro writers and thus kind need to be paid others are blogging for fun and would enjoy the extra distribution).

I'd be interested, however, in seeing the comments left on HN licensed as Creative Commons-With Attribution. I'd personally be happy for commercial use, but I can see an argument for Non-Commercial Use only license.

Everything you write here is being ingested into BackType and a load of others places and being used for all sorts of stuff so why not just assume that comments belong to the ether and be done with it?

I think you have a slight misunderstanding about what "pay per word" means in the writing business. Publications don't just tell writers they're getting $.05 per word and then let them run off and produce as many words as they want. Rather, they tend to have word limits and expectations per article: 500, 1000, etc. The reasons they pay "per word," and not necessarily a flate rate per piece, are several:

a) They want to reserve the right to edit the final piece and/or change word count expectations on the fly.

b) There might be additional work added to the work order, such as sidebars or supplementary appendices. Rather than draw up an entirely new contract or fee structure, they'll just add these to word count.

All in, pay-per-word usually ends up underpaying writers for their contributions to typical publications or advertisements. Pay-per-word doesn't take into account hours per article, which can be highly variable depending on the nature of the assignment. An in-depth research project yielding a 1,000 word essay is obviously harder to produce than a 1,000 word opinion piece about men's fashion.