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, ...
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
I have an insigtful response to this Slashdot article. However, I'm not responding until someone stumps up the cash.
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
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
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
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.