From a post by the guy running the new Netscape:

I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites: We will pay you $1,000 a month for your “social bookmarking” rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we’ll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that–a baseline).

The response on TechCrunch:

At the end of the day, the Netscape product is a soulless reproduction of one of the most interesting cultural experiments occuring on the web right now. It was thrown at millions of mainstream Internet users (previous Netscape portal users) who don’t understand Digg and probably don’t care (yet). If anything, my bet is that total page views at Netscape have dropped since the changeover, possibly substantially. Buying users from Digg won’t change that one bit….The deck chairs are being rearranged on the Titanic Netscape.

The comments:

It is going to take a lot more than $1000/month to get me to jump ship on digg. I honestly don’t know that you could put a price on it. The people that use digg are where the real value is for me.

When you reach the point when you’re willing to pay for members, it makes me wonder when they’ll start paying for readers!

To start paying top users of social Web sites diminishes what social sites are. It is no longer about community at that point. Suddenly, everyone is trying to become an employee…Does it not then make sense, at that point, to cut contributions off altogether, leaving only the hired employees to post the links? It is then not a social site. What a mess.