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."

Comments

Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot

[anticypher]

I came here looking for a post like this.

A system like this elsewhere might draw the Roland Piquepaille's away from /., leaving us with a slightly improved level of content.

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 /. 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.

the AC

I get paid to add links to a site

[ylikone]

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.