You get what you pay for.
If you want NYT-quality journalism, that takes paid journalists. (Trust me. In my hometown, the main newspaper replaced all of their paid journalists with volunteer bloggers, and it shows.) Paying people to produce a quality product takes money.
However, the quality of Fluther, while nice to have, is largely volunteer. They have one paid employee. The rest of the staff, such as the mods, are volunteers.
As a mod, I am not paid. Because I am not paid, my mod duties cannot possibly compete with time I am paid to work at my real job, because I need to make money. In fact, Fluther duties can’t compete sometimes with things I simply like to do because they’re fun. Ask me when I’m cuddling with my husband in bed some early Saturday morning if I’d prefer to get up, toddle over to the computer, and start inspecting Fluther for Viagra spam, skin cream spam, and people who don’t keep up to the writing standards, and I’d tell you to take a flying leap. ;)
If Fluther paid me, I might be of a different mind. But that would require them to make money somehow, which would mean probably, like the NYT, charging people to look at content. And, as I said before, you get what you pay for. (Which is us. Seriously, how much would you pay to see this quip?)