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
Hmmmm..this is not dissimilar from my friend’s idea that the world would be better run by a ‘benevolent monarch’ (in his case, that would be him) rather than a democracy. The problem here I see it twofold: when regular users (or voters) think their power is less, they tend to become apathetic because they believe (rightly) that they have no power, even if the truth is that they have less. The second problem is who determines how valuable any one user is? In the case of social media, users have to prove themselves, but who’s going to keep that system honest? There’s already been implications of questionable posts getting front pages after all. I think real democracy works best, where everyone gets an equal vote, even if it’s frustrating sometimes.
Here’s the problem as I see it-when broadly applied, a one-person-one-vote ensures some degree of social regression (i.e. the teaching of evolution would surely be banned in several “red states” in the U.S.) This is of course because people move through several different stages or “structures” of psychological development, in terms of both their intelligence as well as their values, through which they interpret the world. These are the developmental schemes suggested by Maslow, Piaget, Graves, Kohlberg, etc., each measuring the development of different types of “intelligence,” e.g. cognition, values, self-sense, ethics, kinesthetics, emotional intelligence, etc.
The simplest to look at might be Gebser’s structures of consciousness, which range from archaic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral. We can certainly see all of these stages playing themselves out all over the internet, each structure often heavily armed with a very keen intellect.
We can see this in a broad spectrum of human interaction-in both positive and negative forms-ranging from:
base survival needs,
to (+)tribal and (-)gang mentality
to (+)ego empowerment and (-)power-driven mentality,
to (+)mythic devotion, nationalism, and (-)religious fundamentalism,
to (+)scientific empiricism and (-)reductionism/materialism,
to (+)green pluralism and multiculturalism to (-)postmodern narcissism and “political correctness.”
And, of course, the important thing to remember is that everyone grows through these stages, beginning at “square one,” regardless of how “high” up the “laddder” they “make it.” This is very important-everyone has the right to plateau at any stage of growth, and no one should even hope to somehow transform the entire world to a single “higher” level of consciousness. Instead we must begin to understand how these structures of consciousness interact with each other, and how to mold our social networks in such a way that the depth of our interiors play some significant role. Web 2.0 is about giving everyone a voice, and Web 3.0 will be about recognizing depth within those voices.
How do you think this factors into the discussion of social media?
Major problem: if you were to assign different people more power for voting in politics how would you assign that value? Who decides and who gets more voting power and why?
With all the social news sites coming out this thing is starting to happen. linkbin for example uses a 5 star rating system but it also has a karma system for each user. The more karma a user builds the more their vote counts.
Democracy is the only solution. You would just be building inherent groups of control.
Groups of control will exist normally in a Democracy but they are fluid, instead of rigid which is what you are proposing.
As a top “digger”, you certainly feel that it would be better if your content had a higher listing than others based on that.
But it would be horrible. What we need to do instead is have an entire site with user controlled decisions, and again, 1 vote that equally matters per person.
-notque
I think you would need to combine the power of a social reputation ranking with voting weight. If someone is very active on a site and maintains a “good” reputation then their vote should merit more weight. It is always good to break faction.
“Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people”
- Oscar Wilde
The issue with reputation-based social news systems is that it makes it difficult, to the point of impossible, for someone new to get involved. Sure, certain limits can be applied to ensure quality (just like voting age in real life). Once power begets more power, it spins off exponentially into the hands of a small crowd. The republic becomes an oligarchy.
The real issue here though, is transparency:
No civilized country remains ambiguous as to its voting process, however complex it might be (see: Iowa caucus). And yet the superpower of the social media world remains entirely silent on the workings of its algorithm.
In the security field, it is well known that security by obscurity doesn’t work in the long run. Same goes for social mechanisms - from voting in the real world to social media voting.
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