Slashdot Mirror
Social News Sites Pay Top Submitters
prostoalex writes "With the proliferation of social news sites relying on users to submit and vote for content, quite a few of newcomers to the industry face the need to pay top submitters or hire people away from other social news sites, the Washington Post reports. The phenomenon has also led to the appearance of the surfing jobs, where people are paid mostly to surf the Web and find out new links." From the article: "The system depends on a steady stream of contributors like Spring. Last month, Netscape said it would be the first to pay the most active contributors -- $1,000 a month to post at least 150 stories during that time to its newly redesigned Web site. The job qualifications are rather fuzzy, but an executive said active 'navigators' or 'social bookmarkers' provide a valuable service because they keep the site's content varied and fresh."
Cue the replies in 1, 2, ...
Sign me up!
Social News Sites Pay Top Submitters
As opposed to the Socialist News Sites that eschew the capitalist system.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
How much will /. pay?
Is this the start of a new type of journalism?
I don't think simply submitting stories is enough. A good journalist needs to find stories that interest the readers, that drive up hits, and generate advertising revenue.
Perhaps if people got a share of the ad revenue from the stories they posted, it'd work better.
My blog
The whole point of social news/bookmarking is having a huge community of users interested in a similar subject submit tons of data about it, then the community weeds out the junk, and the cream rises. Pay a handfull of folks to do the submitting and you have nothing more than an "interesting stories" list compiled by staff members.
or subcontractors. How is this different from any other journalist/columnist paid news site or magazine? Oh... They're pretending to be social news sites. That's called marketing.
Deleted
As Digg's Kevin Rose pointed out, these are community sites with many many contributors. No single contributor has a very large influence compared to the rest of the community.
Wouldn't the sites do better spending their money to draw in larger groups of people? Like giving away prizes to every 1000th new visitor, or something like that?
Odd question, but... does anyone know where a guy might apply/acquire one (or two or three) such jobs?
I could greatly use supplimental income. Especially since it's basically something I already do...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I have an insigtful response to this Slashdot article. However, I'm not responding until someone stumps up the cash.
I think this is great. Anyone who's self-motivated and wants to startup an online business, knows that you have to running not one or two, but four, five and six websites to be profitable. This type of business is just another addition to your arsenal. Don't have time to do this y9ourself? No problem! If you've got marketting skills, or know where to get great such ressources, you can run a posting team, kinda like running an auction to see what's the cheapest submitter is willing to pay and they'll try to match it up to a site with that specific type of content submitter is interested in who's pay-out is obviously way more then what submitter requests to write the article.
So myself, I welcome this.
Erik
It's funny that slashdot, usually very good about reporting stories, put such a obvious title up to hate on digg.com. Netscape is the only site paying users, yet you mention that "social news sites" are faced with the delima. Why not mention digg.com? They do not pay anyone for the stories. They have thought about giving prizes out to the top contributors to show their thanks, but this was long after digg was popular.
Digg.com now not at 100 on Alexia with Slashdot at 165. If you look at visitor graphs compared, slashdot is going down almost point for point, that Digg.com popularity is rising.
Yet you seem to have purpose wrote the story to make "social news sites" look bad, or just decided it would be convenient not to mention the most popular one....
Usually slashdot does a good job reporting stories, but this one seemed to "skip" over the most important details...
Netscape is hiring Navigators...and they used to give them away.
I wonder if the submitter "prostoalex", was thinking slashdot would do the same. Now, lets see, who has submitted the most number of stories?
Most Active Submitters
496 prostoalex
Ahh
Digg.com now not at 100 on Alexia with Slashdot at 165.
So the average digg user is more likely to have spyware on their machine than the average slashdot user?
SOO... everybody is dying to know... How much do you pay Roland Piquepallie, Slashdot? We always thought it was the other way around.
Exactly how does digg.com give you spyware? I visit slashdot.org and digg.com on a daily basis and I've never had spyware. Or if your trying to say that people who post to Digg.com are dumb, then I would reply that your comment is just as stupid.
The majority of the people who submit to digg.com news stories are people who are journalist by nature, however I would agree that the comments on digg, are nearly as bad as the comments on slashdot.
That said digg's features allow you to make the experience exactly how you want it, and block out stories you don't want, even filter by the person submitting, not to mention their commenting system is nearly perfect allowing you to quickly balance out all comments and get rid of the ones you don't like for yourself.
It's a self ruled system, similar to slashdot, only digg uses web features from 2006 and isn't built around code, and a comment system that isn't from the 90's (aka slashdot)
You can hate me all you want, but my point was the article by slashdot writer deliberately left out any mention of digg.com, when the netscape social news site has like 1/1000 the visitors of slashdot and digg combined.
Didnt some pundit predict this would happen? I cant find the article about it now, but he'd predicted this and a fwe other things about the internet. If I could find it, I'd start betting on the other things mentioned in the article...
Exactly how does digg.com give you spyware?
It doesn't, Alexa get their stats from the Alexa Toolbar, which is spyware (and IE only). All a higher ranking for digg tells you that more digg users have this spyware installed, and run IE, than slashdot users
Alexa's tracking software is usually considered to be spyware. And don't tell me that the submitters to digg are journalists by nature when I find stories like this, this, and this as a few of the most popular stories in their respective categories. I go to digg to see a barrage of news stories and read the comments because I have nothing better to do sometimes. I go to slashdot to read (usually) insightful conversations. I've never seen a comment on /. that read 'LOL' or 'agreed'. And don't tell me their comment system is perfect if you can only have a conversation which goes one thread deep. It makes for some fairly confusing conversations and retards who don't know how to hit a 'reply' button. And, finally, I believe digg wasn't mentioned because digg is not currently paying their top submitters, and that is what this article is about.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
"Walk into a shop in the US and you'll likely see the local paper plus, maybe, a Washington Post, NYT or another _big_ paper."
Depends on the shop. The shops in medium to large cities have a large selection. Even a grocery store near me carries international papers.
LOL, I agree(d).
Think about it - most of the time, they would get paid atleast twice :-)
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
For about half an hour every weekday morning I add links to a certain website (can't name it). I get paid about $350/month for this simple task.
Meh.
That works out to five articles a day. Most journalists spend days or weeks on one article, doing research and interviews, if needed. A person banging out five a day won't have time to do anything else (kiss the marriage goodbye, if applicable).
:) A very small percentage of 'bloggers are what I would consider professional, IMHO.
I don't see how a person can do five a day, and have some semblance of quality content, unless they are very knowledgeable and can produce fresh articles every time, in which case they could most likely get a position with one of the print publications. The people being hired are 'bloggers, and most 'bloggers are not professional journalists. I know, I 'blog
Another aspect is the pay. A person submits 150 articles a month, for $1000.00. That works out to $6.66 an article. What is the salary for a writer over at the Post, or Times? At that pay rate, dinner will either be beans and rice, or rice and beans, every night.
Most topics of discussion are news driven. I can check the referring search terms in Chatmag, and tell what's hot by the number of hits to a particular term. Keeping up with the hot topics is not an easy task, and in some cases, it takes some guesswork to determine what will be hot in order to provide links to those discussions. They can pay for articles, but will they be something people want to see, or just take up server HD space?
According to Alexa, news.netscape.com has 1% of total viewers to Netscape.com Still a large amount of eyeballs on pages, but will it work in the long run, I doubt it.
This whole thing is another example of Web 2.0 mania. What is it they are trying to do? Create an article and open it for discussion. That is being done now, in hundreds of thousands of discussion forums. The format is slightly changed, rather than posting a topic and commenting, a short article is created, and discussed. There is little difference between the two, and in the end produces the same result. Nothing new has been invented.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
...but I am not getting paid to do it.
>wrote someone with the screen name Wayne Kerr
I bet he's pleased with himself for getting a mention. Bart Simpson would be proud.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
But sometimes the blogger gets the money and the Last laugh. Mitch says that Blogitive paid him for that snarky tirade AGAINST the law firm.
Do you need to sign up someplace special to get paid? Or is it just ANY registered Netscape users who submit? Heck, I've submitted 100 stories in ONE day before at DriverHeaven.
Sure Taco owes him money, he posts way more than everyone else!
this is just Netscape wasting Time Warner's cash on a stupid idea. I doubt very much this will last more than 6 months.
sulli
RTFJ.
This is old news ;) Netscape is not the first to pay for this. There are several sites out there that have been paying for a couple of months now. I will post the names of those sites here, for about $50 a link.
grand gravey
This reminds me of those datacollectors that video everything and are constantly selling data to news/corp companies.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
This whole thing started when one - ONE - person came to Digg offering to buy away it's top contributers. That was the guy running Netscape, it's not a new industry if one clown has the stupid idea that it will make money. Digg nearly unanimously made fun of him and it hasn't popped up again since. The details are "kind of vague" because it's kind of stupid.
Using common sense, we can see that this would in no way be feasible. How could you make $1000 a month profit out of simply acquiring links? Even if you could, all you'd have to do is set up a bot that scrapes popurls, digg, reddit, daily rotation, etc., and compares the links with the list from last hour's scrape, submitting the new links. We're talking twenty lines in Bash using wget, sed, and grep; I wrote one myself for my own use, and it filters out dupes as well. That's pretty much all you see the results of these days anyway; a story will pop up on Digg, and then two days later on Slashdot, and then it will run down the LXer feed for a couple days and then head over to Mad Penguin...
The craze for RSS and social bookmarking have produced an over-inflated information economy where the same story gets blabbed on every blog just like the same story shows up on all the TV news channels at once. Compounded by the link to a blog that links to a blog that links to a blog, etc. ad maximus infinitum, that links to the same damn story you read two weeks ago.
There's too many linkers out there and not enough original reporters. And let's face it, when the entire world becomes bloggers, the only way you're going to have originality is if everybody blogs only about what's going on from their own view out the window by their computer. And won't that be FUN?
Does Slashdot pay Roland the Plogger, or does Roland the Plogger pay Slashdot and then get paid by click-through to his website? Inquiring minds want to know.
I remember Digg the first time around, when it was called Kuro5hin.
I visited Digg a while back. It offered nothing I hadn't seen on Slashdot or Fark, and furthermore there's no filter for me to ignore the sensationalist pseudo-political bullshit on Digg like there is on Slashdot.
Have fun with the Alexa rankings, though. As MySpace has proven, if something is more popular it must be better.
</sourgrapes>
For more information, click here.
Odd question, but... does anyone know where a guy might apply/acquire one (or two or three) such jobs?
I could greatly use supplimental income. Especially since it's basically something I already do...
If you're really interested then you should check an article in the current, Sept 2006, issue of "Business 2.0 magazine. In the print edition the title is "Blogging For Dollars" but the online one is titled Blogging for Big Bucks.
FalconShould there be a Law?
agreed
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Indeed. I think this phenomenon is a natural reaction to the social networking trends of the past couple of years.
In the beginning, there was Web 1.0. The best content, for the most part, was provided by people who had a genuine interest in their field and a desire to share their knowledge. At first, much content was found through following hyperlinks on related sites, though search engines soon evolved to allow content to be found more easily.
With today's "Web 2.0", we have two related but (IMHO) quite distinct phenomena providing a lot of the new material: blogging/social networking, and "open contribution" sites like Wikipedia and Digg. In each case, the key distinction is that it becomes viable not just for anyone to put their content on-line, but for significant numbers of other people to find it. Good content tends to be noticed somewhere in the blogosphere, and soon gets spread by word-of-blog. The speed with which information can spread is staggering.
The problem with this, as is starting to become obvious, is that when anyone can contribute, not everyone will be an expert. Take a look at Digg, and count the number of highly-dugg posts that are reported as possibly inaccurate. Worse, just as anyone can contribute good content, anyone can also contribute corrupt it or deliberately contribute bad information. Take a look at Wikipedia, and the number of articles that get locked or otherwise flagged as controversial. How do you defeat this? You need someone to be elevated above the average contributor, to an editorial role. Here on Slashdot, we have CmdrTaco and gang reviewing submitted stories, and for all that some posters mock them, they generally do a pretty good job. Likewise on Wikipedia, you or I can't just go in and lock an article that's being repeatedly edited, but some of the admins can, and procedures have been established for dealing with common problems.
I expect that Web 3.0 will arrive rather quickly, and in a sense will come full circle. The dominant source of valuable information will be hybrid sites, where a certain degree of automation and public participation keep the content flowing in a way that a small number of editors never could, yet there is always some oversight by those responsible for the site. Perhaps ironically, perhaps predictably, many of the sites that pioneered open contributions of various kinds -- Slashdot and Wikipedia among them -- seem likely to lead the way in the new order as well. Bloggers will carry on, at least for now, but the really important underlying thing about the blogosphere is that it represents a web of trust: if you find a couple of blogs on a particular subject that you like, and those are accurate/interesting/credible, then those bloggers will often link to others whose related content they trust/respect/enjoy. As long as you start from good sources, you'll find more.
The problem of course, is where you find those good sources. In this, I think there will always be a role for mainstream sites to establish their credibility, probably through mechanisms other than just the claims they make (e.g., being verifiably written by experts in an academic field, or blogs on software products written by the guys who actually work on those products). But how do those sites know where to link to? Surely their experts will be busy enough either writing their own content or doing whatever they do in real life to become experts, and won't have time to browse the entire web themselves. Thus we come to what we see in this article: we may see a new role becoming established, for "content middlemen" who know enough about about a field to select plausible content for linking, and refer it up to the high-ranking editors
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Because that sure would explain a lot of things, like Zonk's coverage in the games section.....
They called people who helped manage content in a publication - EDITORS.
News Flash! - Wheel invented again! Link at 11.
According to the article, Netscape paid someone for an article that ended up causing huge embarressment to AOL, and forced the resignation of AOL's CIO:
1 72033 7226
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/21/2
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/22/1
Isn't Netscape a subsidiary of AOL ?
Or is this a different story ?
I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that MMO games used to use paid volunteers like this. Then there was a lawsuit which ruled that because they were being paid (even if only with free game time), they were actually employees and had to be granted all the mandated perks true employees got. That was the end of using volunteers.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
A grand a week to post articles that other /.'s can bitch about; what more could I ask for.
There are two ways to go about this. One -- yours -- is to *increase* heirarchalization by, in essence, creating a level of 'middle management'. That is last century thinking.
A better way is to *increase* the number of potential editors and ensure that moderation and meta-moderation extend *all the way up*, so to speak. Good editors -- ones whose selections get large numbers of eyeballs, thus indicating that they are in tune with the Zeitgeist -- are taken more seriously, while bad editors fall by the wayside. Editor moderation is based not on "quality of content" (like comment moderation), but "quality of form" -- as indicated by the correlative effect of 'number of eyeballs'. This way of looking at the situation leverages decentralization and participation -- the networking "value" of the Web -- for a higher-quality experience all around.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.