If I can find a way, I absolutely will. I've done "unpaid work" before and been screwed over because I was naïve... so I am very sensitive to this issue. Even though your criticism bothers me, it's only because I'm worried that you're right. If you have any ideas on how we can address this given the caveats I'm about to explain, I really want to hear them....
From my vantage point, there is no mechanism by which our lab can pay someone for this kind of work. It's not that we don't have money... it's that we can't find a way to spend it on remote workers. Ideally we would pay someone as a contractor from our grants -- but the amount of red tape involved in setting something like that up makes it completely unfeasible... Our university has already indicated that they are not willing to allow that kind of hiring without a very good reason. Even if they allowed it, every student would have to go through a rigorous screening process and we couldn't work with international students. As an example, it literally took us 6 months to get permission from the university to spend our own grant money to set up a cloud web server... And we were literally just using public datasets! There was no proprietary data at all! So, getting a bunch of contactors from reddit onboarded as paid employees in a timely manner is a non-starter from the University's perspective. I suspect this would also be true for almost any university in the world.
My answer has been to only take on volunteers and make sure that they get just as much out of it as we do. We offer training, the opportunity to work on bioinformatics research projects, and the opportunity to publish. For students who don't have the qualifications to get a paid position, this is highly valuable. Students who have worked with us already have talked about it in their applications for internships and I've written recommendations for them. At least two of them have already gotten fellowships while working with us. If you have the qualifications to get a paying job today, then you don't need what we're offering.... But if you don't, this is the kind of experience that can help you get there.
Anyways, I want you to know that I appreciate this feedback a lot... I really want to find a way to pay people, but it feels impossible today. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on potential alternatives. One idea I had was that possibly google life sciences or AWS would provide some funding to pay volunteers if they like our approach.