/Culture/ Can you trust Web 2.0?
23/04/2008 | Filed under Discover > Culture
If Web 2.0 is typically epitomised by rounded corners and bright colours, think again. Ian Harris uncovers a web of user-generated intrigue and community-driven sleight of hand
Everyone knows what characterises a typical Web 2.0 site: big text, strong colours, and a two-year plan to eventually sell out to Yahoo (but that’s being cynical). An increasingly essential element to any self-respecting site launch is crowd sourcing. Or, as some are beginning to say, “handing lunatics control of the asylum”.
Whenever you give the mob control, you risk being upset by some of its decisions. Wikipedia launched with an “open book” philosophy, but the mushrooming of nonsense pages and vandalism has led to the site revising its original premise. Today, it fights a running battle against spammers who sneakily lace external links to ecommerce sites with their affiliate codes, shaking money out of surfers who visit Amazon, eBay and PokerStars. Wikipedia has added “nofollow” code to all outbound links, thwarting the spammers, but its attempts to fight link spammers still rely on the vigilance of its community. In November 2006, antivirus firm Sophos detected a scam that involved using Wikipedia to drive virus infections. “Taking advantage of the fact that Wikipedia allows anyone to create and modify articles, hackers uploaded an article to the German edition of Wikipedia, including a link to a fix for a supposedly new version of the Blaster worm,” says Sophos in a report of the incident. However, the fix was actually a piece of malicious code. Sophos discovered the scam by intercepting spam messages directing recipients to the Wikipedia article with the malicious code. Sophos alerted Wikipedia to the problem, and it promptly fixed the page with the malicious link. However, according to Sophos, the previous version of the page was still present in the archive, and continued to point to malicious code, which enabled the hackers to continue to send spam pointing to the archived page on Wikipedia, thus infecting victims’ computers.
Comment abuse
Comments are the most popular form of Web 2.0 interaction. You can comment on anything and everything, from the latest kitten on cuteoverload.com to a BBC News story on mortgage crises. But as users are encouraged to interact more, and eager designers give greater prominence to reader contributions, sorting the wheat from the chaff is becoming a problem. To solve the problem, many sites are introducing comment ranking, where readers get to rank comments by voting them up or down. Succinct pearls rise to the top, while verbose nonsense falls to the bottom. Digg and YouTube do this, and ordinary bloggers can too, thanks to a popular WordPress plug-in called Comment Karma. Users can mod a comment up, down, or report it to the blogger. The plug-in dynamically reorganises comments so that they appear in the order that visitors have ranked them. Tagging burst onto the internet in 2005 and quickly became a darling technology of Web 2.0. Now, no blog is complete without a tag cloud, and no self-respecting news site omits the ability to let users tag stories. But as search engines begin to take tagging into account when ranking pages, the prospect of tag manipulation rears its ugly head.
In Digg trouble
However, when it comes to user-driven chicanery, the mischief magnifying glass falls on Digg. The site, which enables its army of users to play editor and decide what prominence news stories deserve, employs an element of “security through obscurity” – refusing to reveal how its story promotion system works. Like Google’s PageRank algorithm, the aim is to discourage “gaming”, but such a seemingly wide-open system is a like red flag to the tech-savvy bulls that comprise Digg’s audience. Last year, Digg deleted the account of Karim Yergaliyev, one of its top users. A Digg spokesperson confirmed that the 19-year-old was excommunicated for violating Digg’s terms of service when he promoted VoIP service JetNumbers in return for free calls. Yergaliyev, who was reinstated after he promised not to do it again, reveals that Digg users are constantly being pitched by marketers. “I receive two or three offers a week to promote some product or service,” Yergaliyev told CNET at the time. “I never do it, but the week JetNumbers asked me, I met this girl and I was really happy with life. I wanted to help anybody.” The firm emailed Digg’s top 100 users and offered them rewards for Digging its press release. Yergaliyev was the only one who responded. The story “JetNumbers: New Approach to Virtual Telephone Numbers” stood out like a sore thumb, and led other users to cry foul.
Tyranny of the minority
The storm soon blew over, but it reveals how Digg is controlled by fewer users than people think. Digg is often cited as an example of the “wisdom of crowds” theory – it purports to be a user-driven website where everything submitted is carefully pored over by the community. If your story attracts enough Diggs, it’s moved to the front page for millions to read. Blogger and social bookmarking junkie Muhammad Saleem says it’s more a case of mob rule than wisdom: “People stop making decisions based on their own opinion. While the system assumes that all the Diggers are making decisions based on what they think, they are in fact making decisions based on what other users think. The herd, rather than collecting all the information the group has in order to make the best possible decision, starts making sequences of uninformed decisions based on assumptions. This is when the wisdom of the crowd fails and is taken over by the herd (or mob) mentality.” Digg creates an incentive to follow the herd – users who vote early on stories that later become popular become more reputable in Digg’s algorithm. If you’re an aspiring Digger, it’s natural to Digg anything that looks like it may take off. In fact, Digg’s simple “one user, one vote” has been replaced by a constantly morphing system that weighs some user votes more than others. Digg CEO Jay Adelson has said that the point of Digg is to “capture the interests of the internet masses, and use that interest to help organise the huge amounts of information on the web.” But the secret about Digg is that most visitors never grab a spade and contribute to the rankings.
This is true on a broader scale. For Web 2.0 sites, combating manipulation is a constantly evolving game of cat and mouse. But while they obsess over policing their users, they may not be facing up to the real threat: fickleness. Years from now, we may come to realise that the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 wasn’t gradients, bubbles and excessive use of JavaScript – it was a false belief in user-generated content. The Web 2.0 movement is hailed for bringing democracy to new media, but just as with offline democracy, “voter turnout” is important. And what’s surprising is that Web 2.0 turnout makes even the sleepiest Home Counties by-election look like a sizzling bunfight. A study by Hitwise revealed that, at any moment, just 0.16 per cent of YouTube visitors are there to upload video. The same study found that just 0.2 per cent of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos. It turns out that user-generated content is scarcer than you think. Ask yourself this: If Digg has millions of users, how come stories make it onto the front page with just 85 diggs?
Just as how real-world politics is dominated by a small, motivated group of participants, Web 2.0 sites are fundamentally driven by an elite cadre of vocal users. Wikipedia is more centralised than you’d imagine. About 1,000 users produce the bulk of the content. “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told The New York Times. “But the vast majority of work is done by this small, core community.”
For evidence of this, look no further than the homogenous stories that make the Digg front page. Stories presented as bite-sized lists or tutorials are several times more likely to make the front page. On average, a “top 10” or “top 100” list has made the Digg front page once every other day. “Your headline must appeal to people with severe ADD or most people won’t even read your article, let alone Digg it,” says QuadsZilla of SEO Black Hat fame. The other ploy is to submit a story about Digg or its creator Kevin Rose. Digg’s audience loves nothing more than reading stories about itself. “Could a site be any more narcissistic?” asks QuadsZilla. “In the past year, stories with “Digg” in the submission have made the front page a whopping 554 times, and mentioned Kevin Rose by name an average of once a week.” Stories promoting Apple, Firefox and global warming are likely to be published, as are stories bashing Microsoft, George Bush, Fox News and Walmart. “94 per cent of the front page articles that mentioned Microsoft in the past year cast the company in a negative light,” he adds.
Why rig Digg?
But why all the focus on Digg? What incentive is there to manipulate it? Surprisingly, notoriety is one factor. Digg publishes its Top 10 users, and they jealously guard their positions. According to TechCrunch, Digg’s elite hold meetings in a “password protected IRC room” to discuss changes to the site’s algorithms. Staying on top of this list is a matter of great pride. Of course, traffic is another. A posting on the front page of Digg can be responsible for huge swathes of traffic to the source.
There are three ways to manipulate Web 2.0 story voting sites. First, there’s the flash mob system, where a team is organised to vote up other members’ submissions. This is Digg’s and Reddit’s biggest threat, because they’re so difficult to track. Although Digg looks for patterns, a sophisticated group could easily behave like random users and fool any system. Sites such as User/Submitter have even sprung up to broker deals between Digg users and those looking to buy their way onto its front page. Another is to “geek bait” – to troll stories likely to do well on Digg with the sole purpose of getting people to visit an ad-laden site.
Trust in the few
Clearly though, there’s only manipulation when there’s some incentive to interfere. Plenty of sites let surfers pick their own fruit without giving up the orchard. T-shirt store Threadless empowers customers to decide what items it stocks, soliciting votes on which designs to sell. Threadless, which sells more than 90,000 tees a month and has more than half a million registered users, is a crowd sourcing success story. The business, which is owned by three partners, prints 1,500 copies of each T-shirt, and every one sells out. Google uses crowd sourcing to improve the accuracy of Google Images, involving surfers in a game of matching images to words. Lego has long worked with fanatical customers to design new sets. And in September, the hunt for adventurer Steve Fossett employed crowd sourcing when it recruited anonymous internet users to inspect pieces of satellite images for evidence of his aircraft.
Nothing new
If all of this is making you think why anybody bothers, bear in mind that the internet is fundamentally unstable thanks to the nature of its design, but also the anarchy of its users. “If you build it, they will come” has been the motto for so much of the new economy. But it could also be “if you build it, someone will wreck it”. While there’s much hoo-hah surrounding Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 sites, before the web became the be-all and end-all of the internet, users were accustomed to participation. The idea of handing over control to users was alien – users were in control!
Usenet was a fundamentally open network. Anybody could post, and anybody could start their own newsgroup. Cracks started to appear in January 1984 when Clarence L Thomas IV posted the first Usenet spam, which contained apocalyptic gibberish proclaiming that “this world’s history is coming to a climax”. The system fell apart, and discussions moved to moderated servers or fled to the web. Today, unmoderated Usenet is bogged down with spam ... and discussions.
For much of the 90s, net users were busy tearing apart the system’s key applications IRC. The text-based chat system seemed to be constantly under attack from its own users flooding channels with large amounts of nonsense text, and triggering ICMP floods, which knocked users off the network with a barrage of useless data.
Of course, there’s nothing fundamentally Web 2.0 about influencing voters. The BBC News website has long been a target for cyber-lobbyists, who detonate huge email campaigns whenever the site runs polls alongside contentious stories. The BBC Sports Personality of the Year is frequently hijacked, and as far back as 1998, people were subverting a People Magazine poll to find the world’s most beautiful person by voting for “Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf”, a character from Howard Stern’s radio show. And ever since Amazon enabled customers to post reviews, authors have been unable to resist the temptation to talk up their own work under pseudonyms. (In 2004, a glitch on Amazon’s Canadian site revealed the real names of reviews contributors, unmasking writers’ real names.) Even real elections aren’t immune to manipulation: After November 2004’s presidential election, three Democratic committee men pleaded guilty to paying voters between $5 and $10 apiece to vote Democratic. But we shouldn’t let this stop us contributing. After all, as Samual Johnson said, “It’s better to suffer wrong than do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust”.
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Comments
Joshua C / 23/04/2008 / 15:41
I really enjoyed this one. I've always been kind of ambivalent about "Web 2.0" and this pretty much somes up everything that I've seen first hand in the work that I do or my understanding of social interactions. Thanks for the great read. :)
Daniel Foster / 26/04/2008 / 14:01 / http://www.pcfastlane.com/
Web 2.0 sites like Digg are just a fad. In fact, I would say Digg is already on its decline. I used to be an active member after the site first started, but now it is overrun with immature 12-year-olds.
Stephen / 28/04/2008 / 22:31
oh the irony of commenting on this artical... esspecialy somone who is "ambivalent to web 2.0"!!!
Luis Enrique / 28/04/2008 / 22:42
After all the same people that does stuff in the "real world" is the same people that does stuff on Internet, so there is no wonder that Internet becomes an extension of the real world in that sense.
matt lambert / 29/04/2008 / 14:13 / http://www.conversationware.co.uk
The sooner we have ID 2.0 working, the better
isaac / 30/04/2008 / 04:32
spelling...learn to spell.....artical is not a word..."somes up" is so wrong...
Luke / 30/04/2008 / 05:33
I sooo digg this
Diane / 30/04/2008 / 13:38 / http://www.holidayunder200.co.uk
The whole web 2.0 relies for the most part on user created content. People uploading pictures, reviews, video and music. In the past publishing was limited to the very best authors, except perhaps for vanity publishing. Now anyone can have anything published and digg it and spread it round the internet. The world wide web has some very interesting things on it, but they are not all polished and perfect. Perhaps this makes it better, or more diverse?
Zombie / 01/05/2008 / 01:17
Digg+
anonymous / 01/05/2008 / 15:39
Web 2.0 is overrated. I liked it better when no one commented on the internet. And yes, this is contradictory, get over it.
Raman / 02/05/2008 / 01:04 / http://doctor82.blogspot.com
We'll never know when a web 2 site will close down. When such things happen, they do so with loss of our precious online data. So better be safe than sorry.
Celina / 21/06/2008 / 02:21 / http://ww.theatons.com/
I don't trust web 2.0. I've been hacked so many times using WordPress, which seems to be at the forefront of Web 2.0. Forget the fluffy JavaScript interface ... lets have some solid server-side coding first. Usually, you build from the ground up. You don't put the pretty wallpaper in the house you built on sand.
Marc Pell / 24/08/2008 / 16:30
How do you get a print format of this article?
Matt / 08/09/2008 / 09:52 / http://www.montagecomms.com
Hi,
Yes dealing with Spam in comments is problematic, but there are plenty of very effective spam filter plugins out there for e.g. word press. I use Akisnet is great for this and I use this on www.prbristol.co.uk for instance and it has knocked out 823 spam.
I love Digg as an online PR. It is great for promoting a story 3rd hand as this builds credibility. However, there are a number of linkbaiters out their who are very clever in making up stories that attract traffic. For instance there was a story about a kid in the USA using his Dad's credit card to hire hookers to play his Xbox with.... The only problem is that the story originated in Cornwall and not Texas...
Didn't stop Fox News and the Sun covering it though ;-)
Mike / 23/10/2009 / 13:00 / http://www.absolutemind.co.uk
2.0 is staying and with all cracks in the system, they wil eventually get ironed out. Interaction gives a more detailed account of everything. Bring It On!
DaviD Holmes / 17/12/2009 / 11:51 / http://watfordhypno.co.uk
2.0 is the future so we have to work with it....resisitance is futile
John / 02/02/2010 / 18:55 / http://airconditioningmaintenance365.com
2.0 is the way forward but there will need to be a little bit more control over spam, I have about 40 a day on my air conditioning site.. Time will tell
