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!

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

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.

Technorati Tags: social news, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, newsvine, iem, hsx, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

in his book the wisdom of crowds, james surowiecki discusses some examples that show the power of google and how well its index performs. to explain how google works, he uses sergey brin and larry page’s paper called the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine, and google’s definition of pagerank, their method of ranking results to your search queries in order of relevance:

pagerank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organizational tool. in essence, google interprets a link from page a to page b as a vote, by page a, for page b. google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives. but google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

the way google goes about it is that it’s not just the incoming links to a page (the absolute number of votes) that matter, but they also take into account the quality of those links (i.e. how many links the linking site itself has gotten and their quality, and so it goes on).

this got me thinking, why does social media have to be democratic (i.e. one person one vote, where all votes are created equal)? if we assume that the average user on a social media site is ‘fairly intelligent’ (though it’s true that not all users are equally savvy and in the end some users will rise above others to be stronger contributers) then it makes sense to give a ‘top contributor’ more weight than a new user just like google gives a link from techcrunch more importance than a link from my site. why? well, a top user, by definition, has become a top user because of all the votes he or she has garnered from other new and top users over time and therefore has proved that he represents a degree of quality (whether it be from natural skill/knack for cool-hunting or just a result of participating on a site for a longer time) that a new user has not attained yet (though may over time).

i know partly from experience and partly from what i’ve read about these sites that reddit and propeller are completely democratic (i.e. each user’s vote is equal and a higher karma or rank doesn’t mean you have more influence in the system), whereas stumbleupon by its construction gives more power to users based on their participation and the size of their audience (previously audience number, now just a combination of friends and fans), and digg leaves it somewhat ambiguous.

so what do you think do we need a new form of government?

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

Technorati Tags: digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, social news, republic, democracy, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds