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How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And How to Fix It

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mouser:
Once power users realize their power to influence the project, they often become its evangelists and actively promote the project by recruiting new members. Promoting such a project means increasing their influence, which is a stong motivating factor. If the system is truly democratic, and hard to abuse, promoting the project only decreases the influence of each individual member. This might explain why truly democratic projects remain relatively small, while projects appealing to democracy, but allowing for abuse, grow very rapidly.
--- End quote ---

that is a fascinating theory, i'm very curious to know whether it really holds up.

housetier:
So this why dc.com is still not as popular as digg: you just can't abuse dc or its members. mouser is much too nice and honest to let this happen. And decisions are made in the open too, everything is too transparent, too accountable, too democratic!
 ;) ;) :D :Thmbsup: :-* :P

Gothi[c]:
It's very tricky to create a system like that, that would work.

Mass opinion is biased by media,hypes and fud (and people tend to follow the 'stream/flow/whatever')

Example:

* A sais 'Such and so sucks'
* B has no idea what A is talking about
* but when B talks to C about that very same 'such and so', B is very likely to say it sucks and pretend all educated about the subject.
* Then repeat this cycle with C -> D..Z.

Then on the other hand, the 'expert editors' solution also faces several problems
* Expert opinions will always be their own opinions, no matter how hard they try to remain unbiased and remain objective.
* Even experts suffer from this same phenomenon as above, but on a different level/scale, and in a different way.
* Power corrupts.
* There are more opinions, views, fields of intrest,  than there is people(and experts) on the planet.
* People get lazy after repetitive work. After having reviewed for example 1000 articles, the tendency exists to fall into a system where articles/posts are judged by quick browsing/reading and not full evaluation, and don't get the thought they deserve before being submitted or rated or whatever. Even when articles ARE fully read and evaluated, the danger exists where the editor's opinion gets molded by certain keywords that fall into the editor's intrests/likes/etc.

Probably not the best points one could come up with,... and there's probably more. I'm not good at providing proof of concept or even writing for that matter. I'm not even going to pretend i know wtf i'm talking about because i don't, because ever since blogs,forums and message boards came along, suddenly everyone becomes a columnist/writer/spelling expert (I fail at all 3 ;) ) [IRC tends to feel more natural]

But I do have very much of a gut feeling that systems like digg, slashdot, etc, will always be and remain broken as long as there are humans involved.

app103:
Just for those that haven't seen my comments on digg on the digg page related to this article/post, I'll quote myself:

Digg is not, has never been, and most likely will never be a good source of links to the best the web has to offer. It is nothing more than a mirror of the ideas & concepts that are hot in the current pop culture. And that is what it is intended to be. It's all about what is popular without any regards to quality. And many people will vote for stuff based on what they think other people will think if they don't because they think their own views are not popular.

If it were possible to buy 1 share of stock in every company whose goods & services are featured in a link that appears on the front page, each time they make it to the front page, you'd probably become richer than Bill Gates, once you eliminate the links to anything related to Digg, Google, or Linux.

The best stuff never makes it to the front page because it's not hip & trendy. The likelihood of an article about cancer being cured by a small group of unknown scientists living in a small 'boring' country making the front page is much less than one where the headline would be something like "Digg member cures Brittney Spears of warts with the aid of Google and Linux".
--- End quote ---

Would anybody like to test my stock market theory? I mean a serious simulation...and code something that will do the job and publicly display the results/progress?

I am curious of what the results would be. (am I alone in my curiosity?)

urlwolf:
Ok, dc is many things (a resource for finding software, a philoshophy, even a business -if small), but... aren't we somehow implementing what mouser describes in his article? We (the dc crowds) post things that we consider interesting, and a few other hyperactive users (mouser, people who post a lot) bump the threads that are more juicy (acting as the proposed experts).

I'm sure this is not as straightforward as I have described it, but still.

The interesiting difference (that could be added to the table) is that digg, traditional editing, etc rely on blogs as CMS, whereas dc relies on forum posts (i.e. all users have enough privs to post news)... thus implementing the ideas of crows filtering. That is something that slashdot doesn't really implement that well.

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