
The problems with social news - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.html
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davidw
Seeing as how it is of interest, if I may trouble the crowd here with yet
another summary, "The Wisdom of Crowds" (which is actually sitting on my desk,
next to "Good to Great") says that to have a "smart" crowd, these conditions
must apply:

\- Independence - people don't look at one another's answers prior to
submitting their own.

\- Diversity of opinion

\- Decentralization

\- A way to aggregate the results

The independence thing is the problem with digg/reddit/yc.news etc... -
instead of a bunch of people voting on their own, and then seeing what comes
out, you see ahead of time how everyone else has voted, and reddit groupthink
ensues. News.yc is better because of the high quality of the people, not the
algorithm.

Oh, the book is at:

[http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/23/the-wisdom-of-
crow...](http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/23/the-wisdom-of-crowds)

But I haven't finished the summary yet... contributions welcome:-)

~~~
steve
I think it's ridiculous to claim that this book represents the ultimate truth
in the subject.

This subject is in its infancy indeed.

~~~
davidw
No, but those conditions make a lot of sense to me in terms of differentiating
a "wise crowd" from an "angry mob".

~~~
steve
I was referring more to the article's statements than your comment.

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nreece
I totally agree. Digg, Reddit, and "Hacker News" for that matter, don't
actually implement the "wisdom of the crowd". The true hypothesis of a WotC is
based on a random survey or sorts. How many people actually look beyond the
first few pages of these social news sites, or maybe their friends (or other
reputed users) links. Social news is still in a stage of infancy, much like
how web search was (maybe is).

Throw 10 random stories to the user on the homepage, let them vote, and the
best stories will emerge. What's point of actually showing them the "popular"
stories as the first go.

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aston
The reason Reddit and Digg are implemented the way they are is that they rely
on people's need for attention to generate a constant stream of incoming
links. Making it to the "front page" of whatever site you're dealing with is a
badge of honor and indicates some sort of social significance. The incentive's
just not there for people otherwise. The only people who'll submit links
without any guarantee that anyone will see their submission should be using
del.icio.us.

~~~
neilc
There's no "guarantee" that links submitted to reddit or digg will be seen by
a significant fraction of people, either.

As for the submitter's need for popularity, I think the basic problem is that
you need to find the right way to balance voting on stories (which should be
more or less independent of a story's popularity, as the article argues) with
viewing stories (which must be inherently based on some notion of popularity
or story quality, or the whole point is lost). That seems like it should be
solvable, though: for example, you could present both kinds of items in the
UI.

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whacked_new
There are some good ideas here, but bing a facebook app Wildfire undoes the
analysis on this blog, because then you still create a closed loop of readers.

It's basically like automated email forwarding on facebook, and email
forwarding already operates like wild fire, when things are really
interesting.

~~~
neilc
Yeah, the fact that it's an FB app was a major turn-off to me as well. What
does building it on Facebook give you, other than significantly limiting the
set of potential users? Surely, building a social news site from scratch can't
be that hard...

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Jd
"We tend to associate with people who have similar tastes and views to us"

There has to be a better word for this than 'homophily.'

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waleedka
You have a major flaw in your logic for Wildfire: the fact that "we associate
with people who have similar tastes" does not imply that "we associate ONLY
with people who have similar tastes". I'm interested in startups, but a few of
my Facebook friends are. If I bombard them with startup news, most of them
will be annoyed.

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zach
I'm amused by the implication that The Wisdom of Crowds is a Web 2.0 textbook.
It's like "obviously this is not the wisdom of crowds, have they not even read
the book?!" I'm not sure that's what they're even aiming at. For my part, I
just want a few interesting news stories.

~~~
jgrahamc
That's a fair comment. I must admit that it's specifically Kevin Rose who uses
that term a lot.

John.

