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

[mouser]

netscape payment vs digg against payment is heating up and getting interesting.

http://www.pbs.org/m...hould_community.html

a nice long piece with comments from some top digg bloggers, like this one:

I love Digg. I believe Digg has the potential to change the way all media is aggregated. Through Digg I have met a large number of kind, bright people. I can’t put a price on those contacts. That being said, after taking a day to let it sink in, I am at the point where I am considering pursuing the offer. I really appreciate that someone is recognizing the value we Diggers, Flickrers and Redditers add to the online world. And that potential for more networking opportunities is very appealing to me.

I must admit, until now I haven’t given that much credit to myself for what I am doing on Digg. I give all credit to the authors of the content I link to. Obviously whatever value I have added to the online world would be nothing without them.

I have been aware for a while that sites like Digg and Flickr  are making millions off of users like me, so I have been considering possible ways to share that wealth among contributors. I think of all the ways you could go (pay per post, ad revenue share, etc.), Jason may have the best idea with the monthly flat rate. If he is convinced that he will get a return on that investment, then it is a win-win.

[mouser]

more, this time from http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/

Dear Kevin Rose: Get a grip
Link: my blog: Calacanis.

Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations.

Hmm. What's this I see on Digg.com? Why, it's advertising! No monetary motivation there then. And on Flickr? Why, it's paid-for services! No monetary motivation there, then.

What Kevin means, of course, is that there's no monetary motivation for the people who actually contribute to the site and make it valuable. For the middle-man - Kevin - there's a fair amount of monetary motivation. (And whatever happened to disintermediation, anyway?)

If Kevin really means it, he'll turn Digg into a not-for-profit company that uses advertising solely for paying for its bandwidth, the salaries of the essential staff, and investment in infrastructure and the like.

But he won't do this, of course, because he wants to sell the company at some point and make a sack load of money from it. That, folks, is the hypocracy of the Web 2.0 generation. Information wants to be free - as long as it's YOU that's giving THEM the information, and THEY can make money off it.

[mouser]

i keep flip flip flopping on this a bit.. but im glad to see these issues being discussed.

for me, the fundamental issue is simple: fairness.

those who build content for a site and help it to grow and do well and make it what it is need to receive a fair (proportionate in some way) share of the rewards of the site.

i do believe this is an issue that "web2.0" business people are trying to avoid; they hope to be able to get rich of the work of others.  and i think this is wrong.

i do think things become a bit more complicated when there is risk involved for some people and not others, and when it comes down to judging the contributions of different people.

the only issue that causes me real concern is the point made by kevin rose (or someone defending digg, can't remember which), which was essentially that if you build a model focused on paying people for their contribution, you will get a site populated mainly by people clamouring for their share of the money.

i think the nice middle ground is a place where people are not motivated chiefly by money, but feel confident that when there is money or other rewards, they will be recognized and the rewards shared appropriately.

[mouser]

i feel guilty like i am hating on digg... but here is another article complaining about the model and wisdom of the crowds:
http://evolvingtrend...est-flaw-discovered/

i dont actually hate digg - i actually find it quite good at discovering useful links (though i am extremely bored by the fact that half of the posts on digg are actually about mundane digg news).

From this post, and this is exactly the kind of thing that troubles me:

To understand a crowd’s lack of rationality and wisdom, as a phenomenon, consider the following.

I had written a post (see link at the end of this article) about the Semantic Web, domain specific knowledge ontologies and Google as seen from a Google-centric view. I went on about how Google, using Semantic Web and an AI-driven inference engine, would eventually develop into an omnipresent intelligence (a global mind) and how that would have far reaching implications etc. The post was titled “Reality as a Service (RaaS): The Case for GWorld.” I submitted it to digg and I believe I got a few diggs and one good comment on it. That’s all. I probably got 500 hits in total on that post, and mostly because I used the word “Gworld” in the title.

More than a week after that, I took the same post, the same idea of combining the Semantic Web, domain-specific knowledge ontologies and an AI-driven inference engine but this time I pitted Wikipedia (as the most likely developer of knowledge ontologies) against Google, and posted it with the sensational but quite plausible title “Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google.” The crowd went wild.

I got over 33,000 hits in the first 24 hours. And as of the latest count about 1600 diggs.

If we rely on wisdom of the crowds and dispense with the input of "experts", do we suddenly enter a world of headline news and surfact level attention, where the only thing that matters is quick snap judgement based on the title of a page or the colorful graphics of the startup screen?

[JavaJones]

Hmm, I'm not sure exactly how to word it just now, but that whole example bugs me. A big part of me is thinking "Of *course* that sensationalist headline is going to work better." and thinking furthermore "why shouldn't it?". Or rather, how is this any different from regular print news, where sensationalist headlines are also the norm? That's what people like and respond to. Expecting Digg to be any different is silly. And if we don't expect that - if we are aware that Digg is merely a reflection of the fairly dull popular mind - then why do we pay attention to it? Because deep down almost every one of us is still interested in the same stuff the popular mind is, even if it's to a lesser degree. I mean hell I found his first title boring myself, the second much more provocative. This is fundamental article writing knowledge here: good titles sell. If a "good" title is sensationalist, well that's a shame, but if the content of the article is much the same so be it, if it gets it read.

I dunno, I'm rambling here, but I'm still kind of annoyed with this whole battle. It's like those people who go somewhere solely to complain about it. Why bother with Digg if it's "broken"? And if you don't bother with it, why are you writing articles about it? Because everyone else is paying attention to it and you think they shouldn't? You're just contributing more to Digg publicity by writing an article about it! How deliciously ironic.

Ultimately I don't really see anything different in this than what has been going on for ages, except now "the people" are more in control. Well no surprise, the results are similarly base as what we had before, just a bit less bland perhaps. After all in the capitalist approach to journalism and information dissemination what sells is what is news, and here roughly the same thing applies. Most importantly both are driven by the same customer base. So in the end if you want stupid news to stop being popular, or sites that promote stupid news to stop being successful, you have to cure people of their stupidity.

- Oshyan

[mouser]

let me try to explain why i think this is important.

let's contrast two (idealized) models for choosing what goes on the front page of a respectible newspaper (i know, not too many of them left).

in model A (traditional model), a small hierarchical group of "experts" decides what to put on the front page, based on a combination of what they feel from a lifetime experience is important to the world, to their readers, etc., and based on somewhat what they feel people will be interested in.  they know the content of the articles they put on the front page and they know that if it goes on the front page, it should be reliable information.

in model B, a crowd votes on potential articles for the front page, WITHOUT EVER READING THOSE ARTICLES, based entirely on a 3 second glance at the list of headlines.

---

the point is this:
leveraging the wisdom of the crowds is dangerous if the crowd individuals are making shallow judgements.

i guess i would sum up my position as being there is a role for both expert and crowd input.  but i'm very skeptical of systems like digg which claim to be able to do away with the top-level expert filtering.

not only is it prone to such wild effects as headline biases, but extremely prone to manipulation by those who want to game the system.

sure you could say "if you don't like it don't use it", but in fact i do like digg, i'm just interested in the debate about the role of crowd wisdom, and how to make it work properly.

[JavaJones]

Yeah, I get what you're saying. Certainly I would agree that filtering based on headlines/titles alone is silly. I'm not sure that's entirely what's happening, but that obviously plays a big role. One would actually hope that this sort of system would result in more content being read that otherwise wouldn't (provided it's of quality) in that - if people trust the system - they ought to investigate anything that shows up in it at least to the same degree, if not more so, than they would any other source of media. That being the case as long as one person actually takes the time to read something and discover its value, despite a poor headline, they can then call other people's attention to it, potentially giving it more exposure than it otherwise might get. Perhaps even more interestingly they can choose their own headlines to encourage more viewers, which throws an interesting twist into the whole thing.

Anyway I still come back to what the root of the issue is and I think one of the problems, if there are any, is these sites claiming (are they?) that they obsolete other media. They don't, they're just supplementary. I don't think *any* one form of media or media outlet very often truly obsoletes another, and this is no different. If they're claiming otherwise, well it's in their best interest to do so, it's simply marketing, and marketing hyperbole is nothing new. But it's definitely incorrect, and it can be annoying to hear that, and worse to hear people echoing it.

Yet this is no different from things that have been going on forever. This is directly reflective of how people always react to these kinds of systems, services, phenomena, technologies. It's just like fashion, which does intensely annoy me. Sometimes I even rant about it, so I suppose I can identify.

I guess I just wonder what all the debate is accomplishing; what end it is potentially working toward. Are you (or anyone interested in this) trying to show people that the marketing is hype, are you trying to get Digg to actually change for the better, etc? It all seems kind of undirected to me, like we could argue all day about it but even if we agreed... what then?

- Oshyan

[mouser]

im not interested in trying to make anyone change, i'm just interested in social networking systems in general, and understanding when collective content works and when it doesn't, and how to build a community content site which is fair.  so i tend to be curious about the advantages and disadvantages to any given model.

[JavaJones]

Gotcha. That's fair enough. So what defines what "works"?

- Oshyan

[mouser]

more from Ian Betteridge's Technovia which strikes home with me:

There's a distinction to be made here between some of the Web 2.0 sites and others.
...
The social aspects of Flickr, while great, aren't necessary for it to have value. It's an online photo service, and on that level no more or less ”Web 2.0“ than Yahoo! Photos was/is.
...
Services like Digg and Netscape, on the other hand, have precisely zero value other than as aggregators of user-generated content.
...
Kevin's hypocrisy is this: he's implying that people should and will continue to do it for love, because they feel like the site belongs to them. Yet, of course, the site doesn't belong to them - it belongs to him, and he will sooner or later make money from it. You can call that hypocrisy, or you can call it the oldest Capitalist trick in the book. Either way, it smells bad.

http://technovia.typ...a_response_to_s.html