Social News Sites Pay Top Submitters 95
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."
Journalism 2.0? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
paid submittions != social network (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't these.... employees (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that what being a subscriber is all about?
Slashdot should do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Most Active Submitters
496 prostoalex
Ahh
Nothing new, IMHO. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Speaking as a Digg native... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Speaking as a Digg native... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think having 'linkers' as opposed to 'original reporters' might be the saving grace, in a way, of the internet and social networking. I was an election hotline volunteer in Ohio in the presidential election 2004. What everyone in Ohio saw, and what even the 'original reporters' in Ohio reported, was one thing; what was actually reported by the "original reporters" from the mainstream media was something quite different. It was quite evident to all of us who had been there that there was a concerted effort by the mainstream media to create an image did not comport with reality, and since they are the main image makers, they succeeded. The "linkers" on the internet took the factual material gathered by amateurs: videotapes, hearing testimony, voting records, litigation documents, etc., and made it available to others. Yes their work was not "original", but when looking for news I'm looking for truth, not creativity, facts rather than originality. The mainstream media was original all right, its reportage was fiction masquerading as news.
Bottom line I'm thankful to have linkers in the news field, because I'm more interested in facts than in writing style. As far as investigative journalism is concerned, yes I would like to see more digging than just weakly tapping into 3rd hand reports, but overall I saw more investigative work by the internet linkers than I did from any mainstream reporter.
Roll on Web 3.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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