Calacanis has finally succeeded in getting a response from Kevin Rose, and it’s not a pretty conversation. After offering to pay $1000 a month to top digg users, the blogosphere is alive with banter about the controversial topic of paying social news users.

Calacanis’s stance is that the reaction from the idea of paying top social news contributors is no different than the reaction from paying bloggers via weblogsinc.com. Of course, Kevin and a good slice of the blogosphere is outraged at the mere thought of it.

Personally, I think that paying top digg (or newsvine or reddit or etc.) users a flat fee per month to do what they’ve been doing is a slippery slope. The problem isn’t because they’ll be paid to provide content–that’s okay. It’s the fact that we’ve now singled out a particular group of people as “top” users who deserved to be paid. By doing this, we’ve trumped the whole idea of democratic reviews. Suddenly, people who are not “top” users get the message that they don’t deserve to be paid, and therefore, their contributions are not as valuable.

But, social news sites rely on everyone’s contributions. The more contributions there are, the stronger the content of the site.

The only options are that no one is paid, or everyone is paid.

A compromise between digg and Calacanis’s flat fee idea is something like Squidoo’s profit sharing. Users should get paid with respect to the amount of value they are adding. This could be done through ads, or simply through counting the number of top digged stories they’ve managed to submit.

In the end, I think that there is space for both digg’s model and other social news models, whether they pay out or not. Social new is still young, and there’s a lot of growing that needs to be done.

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Categories - Commentary, Social News, Digg |