In a recent jobs posting, Tumblr advertised for in-house editorial staff who would be responsible for both creating original content and promoting interesting blog posts created by the service’s massive user base. The advertisement, which called for staff to help “tell the stories of the millions of creative Tumblr users to the world,” was later taken offline. Tumblr’s Mark Coatney tells Fast Company that while “80 to 90% of Tumblr’s new hires will be developers,” paid editors would be used to help cherrypick interesting content and develop original stories.

Most microblogs hosted by Tumblr consists of content—photos, short snippets of text, or videos—that can then be “reblogged” by other Tumblr users or appended with comments. It’s an intellectual-rights headache that has proven to be massively popular. The microblogging service currently relies on a small army of unpaid volunteers who sort out interesting topical content in a Wikipedia-like fashion. (Disclosure: I once served as a volunteer Tumblr editor for stories related to the Arab Spring.)

The mere act of creating in-house content and hiring paid employees to curate user-generated content is an example of what microblogging sites and social networking cope with to provide a serviceable user experience. Tumblr, Twitter, Weibo, and Facebook are all communications services that double as mass media. The decentralized distribution model of all these sites is part of the reason for their appeal… they’ve also fueled social phenomena as disparate as the Egyptian revolution, mass protests in Russia, and ”Fuck Yeah” memes. For all of these services, the question is how to sort, categorize, and monetize the sheer amount of user content they generate.