It looks like Jason Calacanis’ gamble is paying off with his paid Netscape Navigators. At the time, I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea. It is like hiring an entire marketing crew and not needing to pay for their health insurance or 401k. Nice cheap labor for Netscape and some extra spending money for the people doing something they were already doing for free.
Netscape has decided it is time to add some more Netscape Navigators to the payroll with the eventual goal of ramping up quite a bit more over the next couple years.
It is interesting to see the roles the Navigators are expected to play for their $1000/month. In addition to just submitting tons of interesting stories, they are also supposed to help fight spamming and voting rings as well as teach new users how to use the system and provide comments to increase discussions on the various stories.
Sounds like a forum moderator job to me. With all the complaints of spam and gaming the system at Reddit and Digg, it will be interesting to see if having these kinds of moderators helps foster a better environment or just leads to people complaining that the moderators are promoting their own agenda. I’ll bet it will probably be a mix of the two.
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