There's clearly a need for someone to look into scams, and I've spent time exploring that niche myself. I was really excited when I discovered BadBitcoin back in January, until I realized they were shilling for GAW and called them out in the Twitter convo this thread is about.

Unfortunately I don't see much evidence that there's a sustainable financial model to compensate scam-watchers. The most obvious ways to compensate someone for their time are advertising and tipping. When it comes to advertising, the crypto-ecosystem is seeing a downturn in advertising revenue, and one of the big lessons of the GAW/PayCoin debacle is that news sites have a hard time breaking even without taking money from dubious sources.

In terms of tipping, last year when I was part of the Dogecoin Foundation I repeatedly warned people about Moolah/MintPal. Dogecoin was all about tipping, so did I get a bunch of tips to compensate me for the effort I spent and risk I took? Nope, I got banned from the subreddit, basically ran out of town, and ended up resigning in protest. One guy offered to send me $20 five months later after MintPal went under as a thank-you, that's it.

Late last year I spent dozens of hours researching Jason King/Sean's Outpost and talking to people with knowledge of Jason and his activities. It was (and remains) clear to me that there are significant unanswered questions about their operations, and a very worrying attitude towards transparency, so I wrote an open letter to Jason on LetsTalkBitcoin, with a tipping address. I received a grand total of .033 BTC.