Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Digg, the wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, netscape, and competitors

<< < (2/7) > >>

mouser:
fantastic points as usual oshyan.

and the point about slashdot is excellent, because i have found it much much worse in all respects than digg (except maybe for skill level of commenters).

i do think that, in theory, the idea of having some people with a technical background in the area and good background domain knowledge acting as a kind of filter would be useful to add to the mix of a social news site like digg.com.

those people could add some context to links, or say: no this link that you are all highlighting is really an insignificant thing - but if you're interested in this then maybe this other one is worth highlighting.  or: everyone is linking to this site, but if we list that site then surely we should list these others: x,y,z.

in other words, i'm suggesting leveraging the wisdom of the crowd, but adding a layer on top of that, or a filter, which calls on people with some domain knowledge and expertise to act as a balancing force to eliminate some of the faddish effects, provide additional relevant info, and prevent abuse.

side note:
there have been some (credible?) accusations that digg.com really has a kind of unspoken system where certain people (friends of the site) can artificially squash or promote stories.  and one could view the idea of certain people having more points to vote with as being a step in the direction i am talking about, so guess the value of this idea is very much dependent on having reasonable people as your expert filters..

JavaJones:
Yes, as with anything no system can ever really compensate for stupidity, selfishness, or corruption of those in power, as long as there are human beings in control at some level anyway. That is part of why totally automated sites are interesting, because in theory they remove at least the majority of those issues, but of course they have issues of their own, and are still open to being hacked, corrupted, etc. through other means.

Ultimately the best thing one can do, I think, is just build up a good body of trustworthy, intelligent editorial staff. Perhaps *they* can use sources like Digg, etc. to save them the time of having to search everything themselves for worthwhile stories (I think a lot of news outlets probably already do this). But ultimately they are the arbiters of the content and as you said one of the valuable things they can do above and beyond what an automated system can do is provide expert commentary, as well as find, evaluate and highlight competitors and similar sites/articles/etc. In the end if people are rewarded with good, unique content (or content they enjoy - "good" is so subjective) they will continue to visit and read your site, whether it's automated or run by an editorial body.

- Oshyan

alex3f:
IMHO, the arguments about wisdom of crowds mainly result from a wrong word choice.

Crowds are large and very loosely organized groups of people. I think, it is not anonymity per se, but rather perceived individual ineffectiveness and irresponsibility makes a crowd. In a large and disorganized body of people, it is easy to think that individual decisions has no impact on the group behavior. As a result, people don't feel any responsibility and actually stop thinking as individuals. In this situation the crowd is like a superfluid liquid free to move in any direction without any reason and resistance.

This is not what we see in many social websites. I think it is quite wrong to use the same term for participants of a social website. In every case, where a group of people is intelligent, we find structural organization in their activity. People at those websites are organized by social software that structures their interactions. Of course, it is not a traditional organization motivated by managers through employment obligations and compensation. Instead, this is a participatory organization, where social software coordinates people's activities in a more subtle way. This can be done just by altering the effort associated with different kinds of activity.

IMHO, social software has some advantages over human executives. It is more scalable, more responsive, fair, and transparent.  It can be protected from corruption at a much lower cost than human management hierarchy.

mouser:
very good points alex.

i think a balanced view is warranted.
it seems to me there are clear advantages (breadth of coverage, resilliance to outliers, fast reaction speed) but also very real disadvantages (the potential for abuse, random trend/flocking effects, and lack of expertise in a domain).

for me the interesting thing is how to balance these things and protect against the disadvantages.

my concern is that the big social sites we see now (digg for example) seem extremely open to abuse and manipulation, and i suspect there is a lot of that going on in digg and similar sites.  whenever there is such a monetary gain to be had from easy manipulations it's going to happen.

it will be interesting to see how in the future people manage to find ways to immunize social networks from these problems..

Rover:
alex3f - How does a social web site differ from the crowd mentality?  I think you nailed the "reasoning" behind the crowd actions (or thinking) but I fail to see how a site like digg really differs.

They still get "caught up" in the moment and stop thinking.... a lot like most 14-18 year olds :)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page