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."
Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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
Everyone an editor Re: Roll on Web 3.0 (Score:2)
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 editor
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I prefer "tried and tested". YMMV.
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You make a good point here. It will quickly become clear to the editors *which kinds of stories get read a lot*, and so you get competition between editors to get those kinds of stories up there. Certain editors (let's call them "rolands") will always get large numbers of eyeballs for their stories. However, there might still be niches for *un
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Almost as though he were listening to us - or perhpaps, he really was being paid or otherwise favoured by the editors...
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Nope, it's the same as always. Look at the second link ("for more pictures and information, yadda yadda"), it still points to his blog, containing copy-pasted stuff from other sites.
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I guess you missed the last sentence and link to his blog in that summary: "Read more for additional details and pictures about this mystery."
Re:Where's My Cheque from Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
How much does Roland get paid? (Score:2)
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.
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So the average digg user is more likely to have spyware on their machine than the average slashdot user?
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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
Re:Slashdot Pokes Fun at "social news site" (Score:4, Informative)
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
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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 [slashdot.org] 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>
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Isn't that what being a subscriber is all about?
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Perhaps this story would be more appropriately entitled...
In Soviet Cyberspace, Slashdot pays you!
well, that's better (Score:2)
As opposed to the Socialist News Sites that eschew the capitalist system.
so? (Score:1)
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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.
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Around here we call that trolling. And we do it for free!
Re:Journalism 2.0? (Score:4, Informative)
No. It's much the same as it ever was since the newswires popped up. Your average daily newspaper is composed of hundreds of stories straight of the AP. The news editor's job is to fill up the pages with both original content contributed by the newspaper's own writing staff, as well as to place the newswire stuff to fill the blanks. Newspaper editors also get to paraphrase newswire articles (much the same as doing a writeup for a blog) when the article itself is deemed to long and boring; but they can also edit down (or fluff up) AP pieces. The latter is not an option for blogs, since they don't have a license to distribute altered content - the newspaper have licenses from the newswires to cut up pieces.
So, no, these people would ordinarily be called 'editors' in journalism, though of the chimpy, intern-like status where they can't be trusted to actually edit pieces, just pick them out.
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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 requi
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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 the myriad of local, regional and national papers that appear in Europe, still most of the content is from newswi
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Ah, don't you believe it!
I had the misfortune of being the publicity officer for a large local club when one of the big news wires picked up some offhand comment someone in the club probably made about one of our competitive teams. The story was entirely inaccurate, wouldn't have been particularly significant even if it had been true, and certainly didn't
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(Most) blogs don't have any right to distribute any content at all. They may be able to summarise, under "fair use". Actually, if
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That's exactly the model that Newsvine [newsvine.com] uses. It's a good combination of the AP wire feed with user-submitted content from elsewhere on the web.
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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.
You left out one thing a journalist whether a good one or not has to do, write.
Falconpaid submittions != social network (Score:5, Insightful)
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Outside of searches, that's how MSN, Yahoo! and AOL envisioned themselves becoming major portals in early 1998.
Aren't these.... employees (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, they're only paying "up to" $1000/month for 250 stories. Reporters don't get much, but that's pretty pathetic.
Key word: Community (Score:2)
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?
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"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
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It doesn't surprise me, I just think there might be a more effective way to spend money. Building a community is hard, and certainly companies will spend money on advertising. But advertising money into to build the next Digg is compeltely different from advertising a bottle of coke, because of the marketing effects. Certainly there are more effective ways to do that, and less effective ways.
I don't know if Digg intentionally makes a group of contributors more prominent. Certainly for every successful
odd question, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I could greatly use supplimental income. Especially since it's basically something I already do...
blogging (Score:3, Informative)
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 [cnn.com] magazine. In the print edition the title is "Blogging For Dollars" but the online one is titled Blogging for Big Bucks [cnn.com].
Falcon
Insightful response. (Score:5, Funny)
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Awesome, new revenu (Score:3, Interesting)
So myself, I welcome this.
Erik
How things change (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot should do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Most Active Submitters
496 prostoalex
Ahh
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It's obvious, but
"Jay Adelson
As Predicted? (Score:2)
Would be great for submitters if Slashdot did this (Score:1)
I get paid to add links to a site (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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I get the impression that they're trying to short-circuit the process by attempting to *buy* user participation. There are, however, two sides to this equation. First, are those who post articles. The other half includes whose who actually *use* the site, and deem it worth their while to participate. I'd say the quality of user can have every bit as much influence on the overall success as the articles themselves. It beca
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The idea is not to submit 5 original stories a day, but to submit 5 interesting links per day. These submitters won't be writing original content; just identifiying interesting content on the web and submitting links to it.
Churning out 5 new (quality) articles per day is exceedingly difficult; but 5 new links/day is quite manageable, if you surf the web a lot.
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An "article" includes:
Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut
Library pics like you've never seen before...
I'd say $6.66 for that isn't too bad.
I would comment on this story... (Score:1, Redundant)
Looks like they missed the comedy name in TFA (Score:2, Funny)
I bet he's pleased with himself for getting a mention. Bart Simpson would be proud.
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Digg's top submitters do it to get their ego stroked.
Which do you think is healthier?
Blog whores? Not all of them! (Score:2)
But sometimes the blogger gets the money and the Last laugh. [writingup.com] Mitch says that Blogitive paid him for that snarky tirade AGAINST the law firm.
Do you Have to Specifically Sign up? (Score:1)
Mr A. Coward? (Score:2)
Meh (Score:2)
Old news (Score:1)
Reminds me of snowcrash (Score:1)
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?
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EPIC 2014
http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/ [robinsloan.com]
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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 effor
In the old days (Score:2)
News Flash! - Wheel invented again! Link at 11.
So, does this mean ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ?
Lawsuit incoming (Score:1)
Sign me up (Score:1)