Is submitting things to Digg “work”?

by Mathew on September 13, 2006 · Comments

My friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman has been giving me the gears — in a nice way, of course — from his hammock down in the wilds of Eastern Canada, about my ambivalence over the issue of paying the top submitters to Digg (or Reddit or Netscape or any of the other 35 social networking sites out there). You can read his thoughts in the comments on this post of mine, which jumped off from a memo by Jason Calacanis of Netscape about how well they were doing.

Rob says that submitting sites to Digg — or at least doing so in the quantities that make you a top 10 Digger, although Rob didn’t make that distinction — is work, plain and simple, and therefore it should be compensated, whereas most Web 2.0 networks seem to be based on assuming that “pixies” will provide all their content for free (um, Rob, I think down East they’re referred to as “the wee folk”). I’m not really convinced, though. I think you can “pay” people in other ways (recognition, for example) and I’m not sure submitting sites to Digg qualifies as “work.”

In any case, I think the quality of submissions on such sites — as with other sites such as Flickr — has something to do with the fact that people do it because they *want* to, not because they are paid to. Would the quality of photos on Flickr be better if top photogs were paid? Maybe. But there wouldn’t be the variety, and that’s much of what I (and others I think) find interesting. It’s like artwork or craftsmanship of any kind — there’s something special about it because someone isn’t just doing it to make money.

Kevin Rose of Digg seems to agree. As he said at a recent conference:

It’s very important to us that there are no outside motivations for posting stories to Digg. When something makes it to the front page, the only motivation should be that the story was interesting to somebody, not that they were paid to do it.

There will no doubt be people out there who see Kevin’s approach as taking advantage of people, a form of Web 2.0 slavery in which someone else makes money from the effort of users. But don’t the people who submit photos to Flickr and sites to Digg and so on get something? Sure they do. Bragging rights, props from commenters, compliments, contacts — emotional payment of some kind. It’s not always about dollars.

Update:

Rob has posted some more of his thoughts on the subject on his own blog. And I came across a post by Savio, who brought up something interesting: he compares the paying of Diggers (or Netscapers) to the open-source community, which is discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Most mature open-source groups have a small core of paid staff, which he calls a “maven trap.” Interesting idea. Scott Karp writes about another case of user-generated content here.

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Viewing 5 Comments

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    "Would the quality of photos on Flickr be better if top photogs were paid? Maybe. But there wouldn’t be the variety, and that’s much of what I (and others I think) find interesting."

    Sure there would be the variety. You're not paying everyone, just the top posters. Everyone else who contributes now would still contribute. And many of them might contribute more, hoping to get a paying gig. That would increase variety. People who want to do it for free can still do it for free. And obviously one doesn't keep paying someone who doesn't attract a following - in the same way one wouldn't pay anyone who didn't do their work well - they'd be canned. Contribute content that people have no interest in, and you're out. Simple. So, nothing lost, but something gained. Potentially, a lot.

    And as far as Flickr is concerned, a lot of the amateur photos are nice, but you can tell a pro's work in an instant. The differences are obvious. Many of them now post on Flickr for the free advertising, for the competitive aspect of getting comments on their pics, for the community (though this is questionable because there are 1000 complete amateurs for every pro and pros naturally want to commune with other pros) and for the input (though I think the last motive is likely way down the list, for the same reason). Start paying them to contribute, and the quality of content on the community will dramatically improve. But of course, that's not what Flickr is about, is it. For most, it's a place to put your own photos so others can see them. It's not mainly a place to go see photos of interest. So the idea of paying contributors doesn't really make sense for this community - because we 're not really using the content to bring people to the community. Different community, different needs.

    Naturally, Rose doesn't like the idea. He wants to keep the money. And his justification is bogus. As I said, someone who doesn't produce - not merely posts, but a following - doesn't get paid. So the posts have to be interesting. And one isn't going to sit around all day posting to Digg, whether for money or not, if one isn't interested / passionate about doing it in the first place. Keep spinning, Kevin.
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    Thanks for the comment, Rob. Boy, I hope you can keep up this kind of pace when you get back to work :-)

    I would have to disagree with your comments about Flickr though -- I think a lot of people do go there to see other people's pictures, not just to share their own (I know I do), and in many cases it is the non-professional ones I like the best, or at least the ones I assume are non-professional, since the line between professional and non-professional is becoming increasingly blurry (which I guess is part of what we're talking about in a way).
    • ^
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    Hi Mathew,

    If we apply lessons from the open source world, then paying the top 1% of contributors is similar to hiring/paying the core developers on an open source project. And we all know that this is the route that mature open source projects follow.

    I just blogged about this here. I think it comes down to the balance of capital invested vs. capital returned. For the top contributors, they expend a lot more capital then they receive. For the average contributor, they receive more capital then they expend. I'd suggest this is true for open source projects and for Netscape/Digg.

    So, maybe Netscape isn't too far off.
    • ^
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    Thanks for the comment, Savio. I actually just found your post through a pingback and commented on it (and have linked to it above). I think you might be right, and that the idea of a core group of paid users as a "maven trap" is an interesting one. I still wonder whether there isn't something lost when users are paid though -- whether it doesn't change the whole tone of the endeavour. Perhaps I'm just naieve :-)
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    • v
    I always circle back to the notion of a "value proposition" -- there's got to be a win-win for both sides to make for a successful online community of any sort. This may or may not involve cash compensation -- I'd argue that in the vast majority of cases cash doesn't make sense or is unworkable. I think netscape's experiment is both interesting and unique i.e. Calacanis has money to play around with obviously.

    At Blogcritics, there's no way that we could pay our 1,700 writer/bloggers. However, we think what we do offer -- writing mentorship (who else does that for "mere" bloggers?), editing of feature-length pieces, thousands of free review materials, exposure to a far larger audience, entry to a pretty cool community and the untold opportunities that brings, Google juice and traffic for home sites, etc. etc. -- is pretty great and has been the fuel to a grassroots phenomenon based upon not a dime of investment cash.

    Overall, I find myself ambivalent like you, Mathew. And for some reason I bristle a bit at Rose's notion of the absolutely organic process where users submit and vote for stories simply because "they want to." That doesn't really mean anything, in my view. Everyone outside of prison walls does things because they want to.

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