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."
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 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
Actually this is a very US phenomenon as far as I can tell. In the States there tends to be one newspaper per city - even for small cities, usually owned by a conglomerate and employing a tiny handful of journalists backed up by ad sales staff.
In Europe the tendency is more towards papers with national coverage with much larger numbers of journalists required to differentiate their content.
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. Walk into a shop in the UK and you'll have more than a dozen papers to select from, all of varying styles and political slants.
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.
I came here looking for a post like this.
/., leaving us with a slightly improved level of content.
/. and digg to keep the link farmers out. Slashdot still has the occasional good article, but digg is completely awash in bogus links that scraped content from another site and changed the title and summary. Throwing money at the problem rather than a solution sounds like trouble.
A system like this elsewhere might draw the Roland Piquepaille's away from
I really expect the only "quasi-journalists" to be SEO scum who just pollute systems now with even more of their junk, because they can get paid for it. I'd much rather see a reward system for policing sites such as
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
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.
Just because they do it for free does nothing to prevent "significant hierarchies", as digg's Adelson suggests they must avoid:
/. getting posted. Just because a cabal works for free does not make them superior nor does it make them more "social". It's still a cabal.
"What's important to the community is not to favor anyone," Adelson said. "If we betray that and start compensating users one way or another, you create significant hierarchies where individuals are motivated based on compensation."
I've read several threads on digg about 20-30 users submitting most of the front page stories. If you actually pay attention, you can easily spot this by looking at the front page there. There are also several completely buried threads I've run across that suggest there is an automated system where a story submitted by one of the top diggers is automatically "dugg" by a bevy of co-conspirators. None of the 10 or so I submitted to digg were ever promoted; instead someone else made a later posting to the same link, and they made it because they were one of the "chosen few". Compare that to 3 of the 5 stories I've ever submitted to
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with Netscape paying people to work for them. It's no surprise to me that the "other" social news sites are launching ad hominem attacks to attempt to smear them. The idea of paying someone for effort (instead of leaching it from them like a slumlord) only serves to cut into their profits.
In closing, I'd like to say I've not always agreed with Slashdot editors, nor have I liked all of their choices, but I can say this for them, they have never lied to us. Integrity is the essential foundation of a functional community.
cat
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 ?