Social Media sites such as digg.com,reddit.com,and delicious are facing threats concerning their credibility.Recently there has been news of companies paying top digg users to promote articles.

The problem behind this idea is that digg was intially founded on the basic idea that general users should have the power to promote content of their liking without any outside influence.This model has proved to be successful for digg.com as it is one of most popular websites on the web.Its even regarded as one of the symbols when speaking of Web 2.0.

Top digg users spend anywhere from 3-4 hours daily looking for interesting and useful content on the web.It’s not a suprise that many of these users feel they should be payed for all their hard work.

Since digg does not pay them for their work,they are now taking pay from companies whose sole purpose is to generate higher search ranking.Higher search rankings help these companies generate higher revenue by the increased traffic digg brings about.

Infact Jason Calacanis,founder of weblogs inc. reported of proof concerning the issue.In his entry he states:

A PR/marketing firm confirmed with me that they had a number of the top 50 users on digg now on the payroll–and this wasn’t a totally insignificant firm.

The problems that digg is facing now is that a portion–certainly not all–of the top users feel like they should be getting paid for the 3-4 hours they spend on the site each day. Since digg will not pay them for their work they are finding other ways to get compensated.

Digg certainly does have a feature currently in place to deal with this threat.Users have the ability to bury items they feel is unworthy.Anyhow the possibilty that digg might consider using paid editors to clean up content seems closer to reality.