muhammad.saleem

January 15, 2026

guest post at search engine land: 7 tips to win the social news beauty pageant

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 2:13 pm

hello there! if you're new here and like what you read, you may want to grab the rss feed so you can always be up to date. thanks for visiting!

i’ve written a post on search engine land giving out 7 tips that will help your next social news submission shine above the rest.

how can you increase your chances of appealing to an average digger, stumbler, or other social media user, and actually get them to vote for your content?

read on for all 7 tips.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds, keynes, search engine land, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon

January 13, 2026

the easiest way to make your community happy

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 3:04 pm

the simple fact that you have a community around your service or a readership around your blog means that you’re doing at least something right, and that people want to participate. at the same time, however, the participants aren’t always necessarily happy or as happy as they could be. what amazes me about this situation is not only how easy it is to make these people happy/happier, but also how many people fail to do this.

as james surowiecki describes in his book the wisdom of crowds, according to the human-relations movement led by sociologist elton mayo, people are not only happier, but also more productive when they feel their concerns are being listened to. it’s rather simple, really: just listen to what your community has to say and the next time you make a decision, take their thoughts into account. if you end up implementing one of the suggestions, go ahead and give credit where it’s due. but before you do this, you need to have a system in place that easily let’s your community get in touch with you, and create a culture where the community actually believes that their concerns won’t fall on deaf ears.

it seems foolish to me (if not self-sabotaging) that socially driven news and content sites in particular have managed to get millions of people to participate in the process of submitting, voting, commenting, and sharing content, but have failed to institute a system to allow the same community to recommend improvements to the sites and discuss the best way to go about making those improvements. do we honestly think that the 15 people at digg know more than the site’s million-plus users know about where the site needs to be going and what improvements should be next? the same applies to all other social media services. in fact, i find myself wondering if these sites even know the first thing about the very phenomenon they are presumably taking advantage of (the wisdom of crowds). so far, the only site i’ve seen that allows people to participate in the process of site improvement is reddit, where you can submit self-referential posts pertaining to the site (and they’ve usually been implemented fairly speedily).

as for the argument that digg or any other site may not want community input because they want to make decisions which increase the sellability of the site the direction where many claim they are going), i think its impossible to differentiate between features that the community wants and thinks will improve the site, and the features that make a site more sellable. lastly, fevote is a site that allows people to make suggestion boards around communities (for example, here’s one for digg), but ultimately, for any such system to work, it has to be hosted on the site itself, and be instantly available to the entire community.

so help your community get one step closer to nirvana, listen to the very people who are responsible for your success.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: digg, reddit, social news, community, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

January 11, 2026

what do you do if the rule-breakers aren’t punished?

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 5:19 pm

while reading the wisdom of crowds by james surowiecki, i came across an old (but highly applicable) forbes article titled are you a chump? the article is a commentary on the american tax system, tax avoidance, and whether it makes sense. let’s think about this problem.

the money that the government gets from tax collection goes towards things that benefit everyone. you get public services such as roads, police, firemen, and you get a military that protects you, irrespective of whether you actually contributed to the pool or not. why then do people pay taxes? ultimately what it comes down to is that if you cheat on your taxes, chances are that you will be caught, and the penalties you will have to pay then are high enough to deter most people from playing the numbers.

comparing cheating on your taxes to gaming a social news site may be stretching it a little but bear with me for a minute. the more i participate on these sites, the more it becomes obvious that certain sites and people are participating in a way that isn’t the ‘good citizen’ way of contributing to these sites, even though it might not explicitly violate the terms of service. take the example of digg and propeller. both these sites have systems in place that allow users to share their submissions with other people (shouts versus site-mail). though the systems are in place to allow people to share one-off interesting stories with a few of their friends, they are increasingly being used to mass-spam entire friends lists to rally for votes.

until today i had resisted using these systems simply because it’s not the ‘good citizen’ way to participate. however, now that more and more people are abusing this functionality, at the cost of users in good standing, and aren’t being punished for what they’re doing, i can’t help but wonder why any user shouldn’t similarly abuse them for their own benefit. most of us are contingent consenters, i.e. we are willing to participate and abide by the community rules as long as everyone else also abides by the same rules and those that don’t, are punished. if the system breaks down, the community leaders have no choice but to resort to the same methods. after all, no one likes to be the chump.

what do you think?

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: rules, contingent consenters, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

January 10, 2026

trust that makes the web go ‘social’

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 6:26 pm

what is the first, most important element that you need to have before you even begin to think about building a community? the answer is undoubtedly trust. without trust, platform owners cannot get community members to participate, content producers can’t create audiences (and have the community members share their content), and community members will have no desire to socialize if there is a lack of trust. without trust there is no participation, no contribution, and no collaboration.

that said, it is also one of the easiest things to acquire. human beings are by nature social beings, and social interactions are impossible to maintain without the existence of trust. we realize the potential benefits of trusting others, but even more important, we recognize the benefits of being trustworthy ourselves. as a community, we also know that there are punishments for betraying someone’s trust, and likewise if someone betrays ours. but as much as our social interactions are dependent on trust, building confidence and trust are equally dependent on social interactions, namely maintaining long-term relationships rather than one-off encounters.

(for more discussion, check out what james surowiecki has to say in his book the wisdom of crowds.)

take, for example, a blog, or a social news site. if you know that your interaction with your audience was going to be a one-time occurrence, you might be very tempted to use a bait-and-switch strategy. however, when you know that you are going to have repeat interactions with the same people (assuming you plan on being a part of the blogging or social news community), you are much more likely to be a trustworthy citizen.

rather than starting as skeptics, the social web starts by assuming that everyone is trustworthy and testing that assessment as the relationship progresses. so in essence, the problem is not even getting someone to trust you, rather it is maintaining trust. so how do we do that?

  1. don’t build to sell: the biggest mistake most people make is that they build/write/participate to turn a profit. while you obviously cannot blame anyone for wanting to make a living, you have to tread lightly between selling your product and letting the product sell itself. don’t create an identity purely for monetary gain. the relationships you build, the branding you get from personal interactions, and what you learn just from your conversations with others are gains that shouldn’t be overlooked.
  2. be a humanoid: while you should take care in determining what information you are comfortable divulging, make sure that you are yourself. it’s difficult for the average person to imagine why someone would want to be anonymous if they don’t have something to hide. you can create this additional confidence by creating about pages, using your real name, geographical location, pictures, and so on.
  3. take the next step: while continuing the conversation with people on your blog, or with your friends on a site, is a great idea, take it one step further. continue the conversation via email, instant messenger, or even telephone. even better, if you get the chance, go out for coffee, or collaborate on a post or on your next project.
  4. reciprocate: you should give at least as much as you get; to your readers, community members, other people in your space. the social web is not a zero-sum game. everyone learns from everyone else, and ultimately the experience is better for the entire community.

these are the four simplest things that i base my interactions on, and use to evaluate with whom i will have continued interactions. you probably have other checks (if so, please let me know). your value and standing in a community is determined not only by your integrity, but also by how much you give to the community, and you will be fairly rewarded for your efforts. don’t think in terms of just yourself and your community, but think of your community as a part of the larger ‘social web community’.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: trust, social web, blogging, social news, participation, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

January 8, 2026

the ‘el farol’ problem in social news

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 6:30 pm

the el farol bar problem, as james surowiecki explains in his book the wisdom of crowds, goes something like this:imagine that there are a certain number of people and on a particular day, they all want to go to a bar called el farol. the problem is that the bar is rather small and if everyone goes at the same time, it will be crowded and no one will have fun. these are the rules:

if less than 60% of the population go to the bar, they’ll all have a better time than if they stayed at home.if more than 60% of the population go to the bar, they’ll all have a worse time than if they stayed at home.

the other problem is that you have no way of telling how many people are going to go to the bar because all the people have to decide at the same time, whether they are going to go or not. social news sites, it seems, have an incredibly similar problem when it comes to content submission. if everyone submits at the same time and a large volume, some people are always happy and some people are always unsatisfied. however, if everyone submits in turns and in moderation, everyone gets a chance to have their content promoted and everyone is happy at least some of the time. let’s start with the following conditions (for sake of this example, let’s assume all the submitters and the voters are the same people and are all relatively equal power-users):

  1. there is a fixed maximum number of articles that can move to a site’s front-page on any given day.
  2. this number is without a doubt smaller than the total amount of interesting/cool/promotable content created on that day (never mind the preexisting content that will be found and submitted).
  3. there is fixed average number of votes that all users are going to cast on all the stories, and these votes are less than the total number of votes needed to promote all the stories, and are not uniformly distributed among all stories.
  4. once a story is submitted and not promoted, it loses its chance of ever being submitted and being promoted.

to put this in numbers, let’s assume there are 500 great stories, all of which will be submitted, and each of them needs on average 50 votes to be promoted. however, a maximum of 200 stories can be promoted, and there are only 100 users, each of whom will cast on average 100 votes (meaning that 10,000 votes will be cast, which if distributed uniformly, can promote all those stories). what we see is that because all users over extend (submit 5 stories rather than 2), the votes get divided in such a way that even less than 200 stories get promoted.

  1. if every user submits 2 stories, we get 200 stories promoted. the content producers are happy, the users are happy (for a perfect ratio), but we create a backlog of good content.
  2. if every user submits 5 stories, we get 150 stories promoted (because of the vote split the average is less than 2), and the group as a whole is less happier than it could be.

the ideal case

like in the ‘el farol’ bar problem, all parties would be better off if they took turns in participating and did so moderately. the easiest way to institute this would be to have a mechanism where everyone is limited to a certain number of submissions daily. the problem here is that this system would not only go against the basic principles of socially driven sites, but it would be much hated and would elicit an extremely negative response. the simple fact is, even if it hurts us, we love and value freedom of choice above most other things. so the system we want to find is one that comes naturally, from the community, through consensus between the individual users.

what actually happens

what happens is that users fail to coordinate their submissions with each other for several reasons. first of all, some users are simply unable to (networking issue) or don’t find it efficient to (time issue) to coordinate their submissions with other users. second, for many users it’s not in their best interest to throttle their submissions. we have to keep in mind that not all users are equal, even from within the good content, not all content is equal, and everyone thinks that they got it right and therefore the vote split will work in their favor. furthermore, you can never be completely sure that you made the right calls and there for submitting 5 rather than 2 is better for you because you get to hedge your bets.

in fact, i’ve tried to talk to several top users, many times, to try and come up with a system where we all don’t clog the system to the point where no one is having fun, but also get to participate to a point where we are having enough fun. one major problem we faced in trying to come up with the system is getting everyone else to participate. if 5 users participate and 5 others don’t, the 5 who decide to throttle their submissions lose out.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social news, el farol, bar, problem, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

January 7, 2026

why hey! nielsen is nielsen’s best move yet

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 3:47 pm

to get a sense of why i think this could be the case let’s first look at how nielsen media research currently operates (as james surowiecki explains in his book, the wisdom of crowds) and then at how hey! nielsen is making their job easier, better, and cheaper for them.

most people with even a passing interest in televised media and ratings knows about nielsen media research and their tv ratings. what most people don’t know is that these ratings are actually calculated based on the habits of an insignificantly small number of people. for example, based on the last count, nielsen’s ratings are formulated based on 5,000 american homes, where they have wired the television sets with electronic monitoring devices called ‘people meters’. whenever someone from these families wants to watch tv, he or she has to punch in a unique code to make sure that nielsen knows who is watching what show and at what time.

since the company uses only 5,000 families for data that has consequences for over 300 million people across the country, nielsen has to work hard to ensure that the 5,000 families are a good average demographic representation of the whole country. even when the company manages to do that, it is hard to make sure that every family logs every show it watches, and the data that gets across inevitably gets sloppy and somewhat less reliable over time.

though ‘people meter families’ provide somewhat sound data, the major networks have adopted a tradition of ‘sweeps’ that makes matters much worse. 4 times a year, nielsen will send paper diaries to 2.5 million americans and ask them to record what programming they watch, for a week, and then mail the diary back to the company. this creates several problems:

  1. sweeps ratings rely heavily on people recording data correctly. unlike ‘people meters’ there is no way to ensure that the data is accurate.
  2. the sweeps system has an incredibly low response rate (of about 30%) which creates a ‘cooperator bias’ (i.e. people who respond are likely to watch all the same shows and people who don’t respond all watch the same shows which don’t get recorded).
  3. people are lazy, especially if they have nothing to gain. even for most people that respond to the surveys, the are a chore, which means filling them out is probably not done systematically (as people watch the shows) rather done all at one time (possibly after the week of watching tv is up), causing even more inaccuracies in reporting.

all this data is important because this advertisers are interested in who is watching what, and when, because they want to reach the most targeted audience. it’s in everyone’s interest to have more reliable data, but the problem is that to get a substantial installation of ‘people meters’ would require an investment somewhere in 9-figures. enter hey! nielsen.

hey! nielsen: now with more ‘people meters’

hey! nielsen is nielsen media research’s foray into social media. for an overview, have a look at my review of the site. i said back then, ‘with hey! nielsen, nielsen media research has hit the social media nail on its head,’ and this rings even truer in this context.

we know you love tv, movies, music, the web, and the personalities behind it all, just a little too much. so here’s your chance to let your voice be heard, your face been seen, and your opinions be a force for change. you, plus the exclusive access and power of nielsen means that your opinions not only reach millions of people via the web, but may also reach the media moguls who decide what goes on the air and on the web.

with that said, and requiring only a strong opinion and an email address, everyone can become a ‘people meter’ with almost zero marginal cost for nielsen media research and no barriers to entry for the user. while you can read other people’s opinions without registering, you have to register to have your say. and when you do register, they record your location (zip codes are mandatory for u.s. and canada), gender, and age right away. furthermore, and so there is no doubt, let’s make sure that they do plan to use this site to aggregate opinions and information for marketing research analysis.

from their privacy policy:

we also automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information including ip address, browser type, requested and referral urls, time spent on certain portions of the site and other forms of site usage data from members and visitors to the site…we may use this information along with the other information we collect for general market research purposes, including preparing reports and analysis on the opinions, behavior and characteristics of the members and users of the hey! nielsen site.

as a leading provider of information and services for the media and entertainment industries, one of the goals of the nielsen company is to help others understand consumer behavior and opinions across all media and entertainment platforms, including the internet. one way we do this is by conducting market research and analysis on the opinions, interests, demographics and behavior of the users and members of the hey! nielsen site. we use this information, along with information we may obtain from other sources (such as other market research firms), to prepare various market research reports and analyses for our clients and prospective clients relating to the various content and other information made available in connection with the site.

there are several reasons why i think this is a great move for nielsen and one that shows that at least one media company knows what’s going on, on the internet.

  1. it’s dirt cheap: brainstorming, creating, maintaining, and marketing the site, and aggregating the data from the site is far more cost-effective and efficient than attempting to install ‘people meters’ by the same volume or continuing with sweeps month.
  2. there’s much more information: users have the option to read, react, and respond to information the other users post and can rate events, shows, and personalities. not only is the degree of interactivity much higher, but even if a visitor doesn’t interact with a page, just visiting a page is measures a degree of interest.
  3. it’s completely hands-off: people-powered content aggregation and content rankings ensure that the ecosystem keeps working without outside intervention (unlike the sweeps). furthermore, data is automatically aggregated and sorted so that the community does all the work and nielsen can reap the benefits of the users’ interactions without much work and without having to push the users.
  4. it projects the future: profiles and calendars help nielsen keep track of what people are interested in currently, but they also show what what upcoming events people are looking forward to.

overall, hey! nielsen is not just cheaper, but it is more efficient, more accurate, and accumulates much more information than is possible using existing means.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: nielsen media research, nielsen, hey! nielsen, entertainment, television, ratings, rankings, advertising, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

January 6, 2026

is socializing ruining social news?

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 6:30 pm

many of the quality-related flaws of social news sites can simply be attributed to the fact that they aren’t mainstream enough. as these sites grow larger, we can hope to see them become more diverse and shed most of their biases (i.e. pro-apple and anti-microsoft, pro-nintendo and anti-sony, and so on). at the same time, however, as social news sites grow, the addition of new social networking and on-site communication features are working against any gains these sites would make from become more mainstream and more diverse. could it be that the problem with social news sites is that they are too…social?

from the digg about page:

from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. you won’t find editors at digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

how do we do this? everything on digg — from news to videos to images to podcasts —is submitted by our community (that would be you). once something is submitted, other people see it and digg what they like best. if your submission rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

social media is as much a tool for networking with like-minded people and developing off-site and even offline relationships as it is about socially driving news. therefore, by its very nature, it is hard to ensure that content promoted on a socially driven site is actually harnessing the collective intelligence of the site’s audience. while what digg and most similar social news sites say, sounds good, what we see happening in reality is that as we get more socially involved with other users on these sites, we don’t actually vote for what we like best, but we vote based on what our friends like and what they want us to like.

therein lies the problem. some of the fundamental requirements for a group to be collectively intelligent are diversity, independence, and decentralization. we can solve the diversity issue by opening up to a more mainstream audience and making a platform easy to use and appealing to the masses, but the problems of independence and decentralization, are much harder to solve in social media because of the ‘social’ element of these platforms. we need diversity and independence because without them, we get a largely uniform audience and the content submitted and shared on the site isn’t a result of scrutiny or debate (this is one of the reasons why we end up content that is mostly pro-apple and anti-microsoft, and similarly divided into camps with unbalanced representation).

this is not to say that these sites shouldn’t be social at all, because groups certainly benefit from people talking to each other and learning from each other (otherwise there would be a significant barrier to entry because you wouldn’t be able to rely on the experiences of others). the key is in how much you allow the community to interact and how much information the users can share amongst themselves. if there is too much communication, it can lead to the group becoming collectively less intelligent and making poor choices. according to james surowiecki, author of the wisdom of crowds, the best way for a group to be smart (collectively intelligent), is for each person to think and act as independently as possible. however, the more we interact and the better we get to know each other through the social networking mechanisms of social news sites, we can’t help but ignore the right ‘independent’ choices in favor of the more comfortable ‘influenced’ ones.

further reading: joshua porter has an interesting piece that explores how digg is using site design to combat some of these issues brought about by giving the community more room to be social.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social news, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds, diversity, independence, decentralization, joshua porter

January 3, 2026

digg bury recorder? don’t get too excited

Filed under: social media — muhammad saleem @ 5:46 pm

more than a few people have pointed me towards a tool created by ajax economy that purports to record all bury data for any submission made to digg, asking for comments. i would love to see a tool like this that works and captures 100% of the data but here’s why you shouldn’t get too excited about this particular tool. on the announcement page for version 0.2 of the tool, the site states that the tool is capturing 100% of the data but if you read into how the tool works you’ll see that a more accurate statement is that ‘it captures 100% of all available data’, which is not much by any means.

this application gets the json feed used by digg spy. it does this using ajax (i.e. the xmlhttprequest object) which requires a server side proxy due to domain security restrictions. due to the way that the json is returned from digg spy, it doesn’t set a variable equal to the returned object, which force us to use the before mentioned server side proxy and an eval statement instead of using dom manipulation. the application simply polls for updated data every 20 seconds which makes sure we don’t miss any data and that it doesn’t put too much strain on the server.

the simple problem here is that the tool relies on the json feed from digg spy and yes, it does capture 100% of the data shown by that feed. the feed from digg spy, however, only shows approximately less than 10% of the activity on digg (just do some basic math in your head and you’ll see that there is no way that it could show more data than that and be even remotely readable). so what you essentially have is 100% of 10% of all data, which for all purposes is highly inaccurate because even the 10% is not spread over all stories.

that said, if someone has come up with a better, more accurate way to record information, or thinks the above mentioned is incorrect, please have your say in the comments. for what i know digg shows partial data and there is no way to get the data for the all the activity on the site.

Technorati Tags: digg, digg spy, ajax economy, bury, tool, data

what is a top ‘social news user’ anyway?

Filed under: social media — muhammad saleem @ 12:10 pm

there are several objective ways to determine someone’s rank or to fit someone into an artificial hierarchy on a socially driven site, and i will cover some of the existing ones and offer some thoughts of my own. what you will note is that no single objective measure is enough and we need some way to calculate participation across all these metrics.

  1. promoted stories: this is the absolute number of stories out of all your submissions, that have been promoted to a site’s homepage. the problem here is that people can submit as many stories as they find, in the hopes that some of them will make it to the homepage, and not enforce any quality control (i.e. they will hedge their bets by banking on volume rather than quality).
  2. promotion ratio: this is the percentage of your submissions that end up on the homepage. the problem here is that though a user may have a solid ratio, in most cases a high ratio is the result of very rigorous quality control, which usually means infrequent submissions. users with high ratios usually have low overall participation.
  3. average votes received: the average votes a user receives per story is a good indicator of average content quality. someone can have a lot of stories promoted with all of them receiving 400 votes or he can have a few stories promoted with 3,000 votes each. just having a story promoted is not enough because often stories are promoted and then get buried or are promoted but don’t really catch on.
  4. average comment ratings: how well are a community member’s comments generally received? slashdot has one of the most developed comment rating systems among the top news aggregators right now because it allows you to not only rate a comment but also categorize a comment (for example, as humorous, insightful, etc).

those are some of the mechanisms that exist (though only the first two are used by most people). here are a couple of other metrics that could potentially be used:

  1. quality of votes given: does a user blindly vote everything or heavily reciprocate? or does the user only vote for the content he thinks is good and should be promoted? one of the ways we could judge the quality of votes given (from the general community’s perspective) is to see what percentage of stories a user votes on, ultimately end up on the homepage of the site.
  2. diversity of participation: diversity of participation is akin to balanced participation. this category will distinguish those that are just submitting apple rumors and ron paul stories from those who contribute good content in a wide-ranging array of categories.

like i said, none of these measures are telling enough on their own but if we are able to use all of them together, we can come up with a better way of recognizing who the best participators in social news are, above and beyond pure popularity. are there any other metrics that you think we should be looking at as well?

Technorati Tags: social news, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, slashdot, top user

social news and the quest for ‘reward’

Filed under: social media,the wisdom of crowds — muhammad saleem @ 12:01 am

according to james surowiecki, author of the wisdom of crowds, what’s interesting about decision markets such as the iem (iowa electronic markets) and the hsx (hollywood stock exchange) is that they function fairly well without much (or any) money at stake. however, evidence suggests that such markets operate better (i.e. the people participating in these make better decisions) when there are financial rewards attached to decisions made in the markets. extending the same idea to social news, propeller has been paying scouts for over a year now and is very happy with the progress they have seen, and newsvine has a somewhat different revenue-share model with its community which seems to be working just as well. at the same time, other major contenders (digg, reddit, and stumbleupon) refuse to reward their users.

the decision of some sites compensate community members has had the obvious impact of increasing participation and hypothetically the quality of the participation on those sites, but has also had an unintended side-effect. for example, newsvine is a mix of news with blogged content and links, but since users make money from ads on their content, it is in every user’s best interest to produce the best possible content to make the most money possible. at the same time, because some people are making money in the social news sphere (i.e. the hired scouts at propeller and the popular content producers on newsvine), people on other sites have been exposed to the idea of making money from social news. in the absence of any official ways to make money on these other sites, people are look towards external sources for income.

why do we participate on other social news sites?

here are some of the reasons i could think of:

  1. status and reputation: just because we want to climb to the top of the leaderboard and be recognized for our efforts.
  2. monetary reward: because we can make money through it. in this case this money isn’t coming from the site, rather from someone on whose behalf you’re participating.
  3. self-promotion: because we want to be in a position to push our own content and build traffic to our own site/product/service.
  4. helping others: because we can help other people out. part of the reason why i continue to participate on digg is because i know how much value the site can create for a content producer and if i can help someone get closer to that goal, that’s enough for me.
  5. idealism: because we believe in the principle of socially driven news and want to be a part of the movement.

what’s even more interesting about surowiecki’s analysis is his mention that for active participants in these markets, status and reputation is often incentive enough to get them to participate in something that is ultimately a game (much like social news). which means that just the existence of a leaderboard should be enough to keep people who are looking for rewards, interested in social news sites. the problem, however, is when one group is making money, the status and reputation doesn’t seem like a satisfactory enough reward, and what we notice is that the number of people is who are participating in social news either for fun or because they believe in the movement, starts to dwindle in favor of #2 and #3 from above.

of course there is genuine interest in the social news space, but this secondary reason (especially for long-time users with some clout) is becoming increasingly important. a substantial number of users are participating because they think at some point they will be able to get a return on their participation (their time investment in the sites), which can also be seen in the huge influx of content producers and marketers into the space, not because they want to genuinely participate, but because they are seeking the the future return.

what reward is rewarding enough?

if money corrupts social news participation (as many non-paying sites claim) and your name on a page is not rewarding enough any more, then how do social sites reward users that are bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for them?

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

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