Have Digg Account, Will Submit

from the gaming-the-system dept

Fri, Dec 8th 2006 1:25pm — Carlo Longino

One of the questions that's continually raised about Digg (and indeed, many other social media sites) is for how long users will tolerate doing the manual labor for sites without receiving any sort of financial remuneration. Obviously, the idea with something like Digg is that the users' work benefits themselves by creating the site -- in essence, free access to the flow of stories from the collective body of readers is the payment for submitting and ranking stories. Some social media sites have tried to change this by paying people to submit items to the site, but that's something Digg has sworn it will never do. However, apparently popular Digg users are being solicited by companies (via Techmeme) to promote their stories in exchange for payment. It's hardly surprising, but it's an interesting problem for Digg, or any site where the "top" users hold a lot of influence. It's a question of incentives: if Digg offered users a way to profit, would they be less interested in schemes to profit from selling their influence and gaming the system? Some sites are already using revenue-sharing plans, where submitters of popular stories and highly-rated opinions get a share of ad revenues. Of course, even with such a plan in place, there will be some users that will still sell their "services" to others seeking to gain some online attention, but if a revenue-sharing system is viable, it would remove (or at least lessen) the incentive to do so for many users. Some people try to frame the issue of payment almost as a moral one, that it's only right for these users to be paid for their work. But moral superiority isn't the main concern for social media sites here -- they may be forced to start paying users to try and protect the integrity of their systems.

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8 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 8 Dec 2006 @ 2:22pm

Everyone will feel compensated for what they spend time on. Some people will find a way to be paid for their work. Others will be satisfied with intangible benefits. This is a law and applies to everything, digg included.
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spoon?!?!, 8 Dec 2006 @ 2:24pm

So the question remains, what's the difference between content one is paid to peddle on social sites and free information? Which has more truth in it? Who pays you to post information on this site?
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- Anonymous Coward, 8 Dec 2006 @ 2:32pm
  
  Re:
  This is just a reformulation of an old conundrum. Is a payment a bribe if it is just paying you to do/say what you would have done/said anyway? And a person who is not getting paid--are his motives pure anyway? Money may or may not have to do with any of it. But our decision typically is to assume the worst, that any such payment is a dirty bribe.
  
  If I was a lead digger, and word got out that I had received money... how would my colleagues react? Maybe my motives are as pure as ever but I will not be trusted.
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Ryan, 8 Dec 2006 @ 2:33pm

exactly
I used to write for shoutwire.com (a digg clone). To date, I have one of the most popular editorials to date, but I quite for this reason.

They took a direction that was purely "what can we do to make money at the expense of user experience and site quality" and that was enough for me.

I don't know if that's the attitude at digg, but once it becomes about making profit, the site quality goes to hell.

I'd wager that the spam outweighs the legit stuff heavily. The only incentive I have to submit stuff to Digg is to submit stuff I write myself.
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Bumbling old fool, 8 Dec 2006 @ 3:52pm

There's a reason I'm not a top digger
'cause if someone tried to "purchase my influence in the auto-democratic process" ("buy" me out), I would likely blog about it, and digg my blog instead.

Well, I think I would at least. I guess I'd have to see how much they're offering first. :)
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Dec 2006 @ 4:03pm

slashvertisements
so basically companies are now so lazy that instead of making a slashvertisement style story submission, they offer to pay people that regularly get their story submissions on the front-page to write up an advertisement for them?
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Anon, 8 Dec 2006 @ 5:49pm

This is the same thing AOL did to Digg. AOL offered something like the top 50 digg submitters $1000 (forget if it was one time or monthly) to come to AOL's rip off site of Digg. Didn't work.
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Search Engines, 8 Dec 2006 @ 8:31pm

SearchEngines
As a former top member, the fact that Digg was offering a free valuable service, making it quite easy to get updated information from a variety of sources and about a variety of topics, was motivaton enough to contribute.

After all, Digg is paying the hosting and maintanence on this very expensive undertaking - all the users have to do is type in a URL 24/7 to be informed
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