...In the end of the day AAM is a community of contributors and the success or failure of the site is largely down to those contributors
I for one would like to see the policies set, with reference to the democratic views of all the community and not just one person.
Unless that changes, I would not be keen to make a financial contribution to AAM.
I have no particular insight into how this site is run, but I would make a couple of contrary observations. Firstly, if someone wasn't stumping up the cash to run the basic web server infrastructure, there would be no site, end of story. Without that, there
can be no content contributors, so it is the first prerequisite for the existence of the site.
Second -- and I don't know enough to make specific comments about
this site, but I can make a general comment based on how I've seen many other forums run -- it's
NOT a democracy nor can it be. Democracy works fine for some things -- but I bet your place of employment is not a democracy, for instance. Even if you value teamwork and cooperation, there will be somebody whose job it is to dictate how things are going to be.
Even more so on an internet forum that allows all and sundry to contribute anonymously, without some level of autocratic moderation the site will eventually fall foul of the trolls, the uninformed, the argumentative, the malicious. And, if I was to hazard a guess, I bet that the moderators here would tell you that life's too short to treat every contributor who thinks they should be running the site with kid gloves.
By way of disclaimer, I have no connection with this site. I just come here for information. This thread has actually made me think about the valuable tidbits I've picked up over the last few months ... so I might just go make a contribution. (edit: done)