/Big Mouth/ Idiot wind
12/01/2007 | Filed under Discover > Big Mouth
I hate flying. As if enduring early starts, security, delays and uncomfortable seats wasn’t unpleasant enough, chances are you’ll be sharing a glorified veal crate with the worst people in the world
Last week, I flew to Spain. A 6am flight meant a 4am check-in and a 2.30am start, but I figured I’d sleep on the plane. No chance – 10 of the most pissed people I’ve ever seen in my life (a bunch of lads on a stag weekend) were sat in the rows immediately behind me, and a very large woman was languishing in the seat in front of me.
She spent the entire three-and-a-half hour flight with her seat fully reclined, bouncing it up and down until my knees were completely knackered. Meanwhile, the stag’s pissed pals spent the flight shouting, screaming, swearing, singing and occasionally punching one another. It was all very Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 aims to harness the wisdom of crowds, but all too often, it ends up with the mooing of herds. Before long, any high-profile social-powered site attracts the mad and the bad, the sick and the thick, the selfish and the stupid, all of whom – by accident or by design – undermine the site’s lofty ideals.
Take Digg.com for example: the selfproclaimed “future of news” harnesses the wisdom of crowds to ensure that only the most interesting and important stories rise to the top. As an owl once put it, “O RLY?” These days, the news that rises to the top of the heap is usually trivial, occasionally inaccurate and frequently followed by flame wars between ill-informed fanboys.
The future of news? The second most popular World & Business story on Digg this year is Sexual urges of men and women – a short, badly written and spectacularly unfunny gag that you’d expect to receive in a forwarded email from an annoying uncle.
The good, bad and ugly
Digg does have lots of smart users, but their submissions are drowning under a tide of useless trivia, yet Digg isn’t the only site that’s suffering. Show me any social-powered site and I’ll show you the people who are gradually dragging it down – from the Wikipedia wreckers and Flickr flashers to the legions of Black Hat SEOs, spammers, scammers, self-promoters, spin doctors and viral marketers who’ve decided that their interests are much more important than those of the communities they target.
The more of these self-seeking users there are, the quicker the good users – the smart ones, the very people whose wisdom Web 2.0 aims to harness – will get fed up and head off somewhere else.
None of this should be a surprise to any of us – it’s the very nature of the net – but what is surprising is the naive optimism of the Web 2.0 cheerleaders as they unveil yet another people-powered production based on the caring, sharing, honest-to-God goodness of the internet community. Whenever someone waxes lyrical about people power or the wisdom of crowds, you can be sure of one thing: they’ve never been on a budget flight to Barcelona.
Comments
zestypete / 12/01/2007 / 13:01 / http://nickandkeith.blogspot.com/
Using Digg to defend this argument doesn't quite work. Digg began as an aggregate of tech-specific stories suggested by users, then expanded its remit to include gaming, entertainment and so on, as users kept dropping in stories from outside the intended subject matter. This explains (in part) it's current fascination for stories on video games, tech developments, tasteless jokes and The Daily Show.
The real problem is a lack of filters. In Digg's case, the only filters are the people using the site - the "mob" of your article. Go to a user-generated news aggregate like www.newsvine.com and you'll find a more thoughtful system, whereby new users have to go through a boot camp of sorts (The Greenhouse) before they earn full privileges. Go to BoingBoing – consistently on of the top three most visited sites on the web - and the editors/founders are the filters. It's still user generated content, still silly, entertaining stuff, but the crap's being actively filtered out. Even Wikipedia's got filters/trusted editors that will eventually clean up messes on the site.
You might argue that filters/editors aren't very Web 2.0, but user-generated content doesn't automatically mean free-for-all. And besides, someone has to sort the needles out from the haystack (or wheat from the chaff - pick your metaphor).
David Harris / 13/01/2007 / 18:02 / http://mediarevolutionary.com
There are many issues to resolve with the new media that need solution, but as a community of journos and programmers, our focus should be trial not error, leaving the complaining to the afraid-of-change.
Not to say that we don't need to point out deficiencies or have public discourse and identify shortcomings, but we need to compliment the critique with solutions. The new media is just that, new. There are wrinkles and even canyons to smooth by trial and error. The easy critique is a short "this sucks", but to get there together, we need suggestions and points of light to illuminate our path.
In his article <i>Idiot wind</i>in <a href="http://www.netmag.co.uk"><u>.net</u></a>; magazine, Gary Marshall climbs up on a perch and points down at the idiot masses who are not sophisticated enough to use the new media .
[q url="http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/idiot-wind";]Web 2.0 aims to harness the wisdom of crowds, but all too often, it ends up with the mooing of herds. Before long, any high-profile social-powered site attracts the mad and the bad, the sick and the thick, the selfish and the stupid, all of whom – by accident or by design – undermine the site’s lofty ideals.[/q]
This generalized form of complaint offers no intellect into the pool, no new ideas or solutions. Is the tragedy that infant tech mobs are behaving badly, not understanding the drain on the opportunity. Or, is the real tragedy that those who know better are using their elected (impeachable) megaphone to piss in the pool instead of making signposts.
In the same issue of <u>.net</u>, usability guru <a href="http://www.useit.com/prioritizing/">Jacob Nielson</a> lays out both problem and solution, issue and resolution. His article is a good example of an open source monlogue, where the experienced meets questions head-on, without the junk food of pointing fingers.
There will be growing pains, but all experience grows the wisdom we will need to engage the new media and take the power of information back.
Gary / 19/01/2007 / 10:25 / http://www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com
Zestypete:
> The real problem is a lack of filters.
I agree entirely.
David:
> points down at the idiot masses who are not sophisticated enough to use the new media
No, you misunderstand me: I'm going after the site builders, not the site users - the "naive optimism" of the "cheerleaders".
Online and offline, there will always be people who, if left to their own devices, will do their best to ruin things for everyone else - the whole tragedy of the commons thing. That's something all site builders - particularly community site builders - need to think about.
Bear in mind that .net's aimed primarily at the design and development community; I'm arguing that, if someone's building yet another people-powered production, they need to take into account the fact that people will misbehave, people will try and game the system for their own benefit... people will basically be people. So if you're going to have users reviews, you need to think *in advance* of the ways people may try to pervert them; if you're going to create something that drives massive traffic spikes to featured sites, you need to think in advance of the ways people might try to rig that, and so on.
As I say in the piece, this is nothing new. It's why forums have AUPs and moderators, chat rooms have banning options, blog comments have moderation options and so on. Just because Web 2.0 sites look nicer than previous internet things doesn't mean they won't face the same problems as every other web technology.
