Slashdot Mirror
Trusting Users Too Much
An anonymous reader writes to alert us to an article at Forever Geek
on sites that trust users too much and the users who game them. From the article: "Trusting users is a good thing. But implicitly trusting users is no good. If Digg has moderators who approve a story before it goes live on the front page, shouldn't they have moderators checking spam reports? Social sites give so much power and emphasis on users yet a handful still have the power to wreck these sites. Until these issues are properly addressed, social sites will continue to be gamed."
Don't even get me started on Digg.... *grumble grumble grumble* I've got a love/hate relationship with that place. Sometimes it's great...other times you get 4 or 5 of the same stories on the main page at a time or people posting politics related stories under the videos section...things like that.
"A person is smart, people are dumb." "People" are not ready to do their own editing on social sites....IMHO.
Seriously, this is a common and old problem, not just among users, but among all positions public or private. Ultimately you need a self policing policy to evaluate users, fair judgement on violations and termination where deemed necessary.
There's got to be, published somewhere, some guidlines and how scalable they are.
I was in a position to make or break the hiring of a student I knew was writing password spoof programs. I knew he had done it. I also knew he hadn't done any harm in it. I think him knowing I knew was enough and it more or less proved right in the long run, opting to hire him as a student worker anyway. Most of us started out the same way. It takes a bit more psychology to spot those who lie about innocuous activities and could present a greater problem down the road.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's whining. People aren't happy with just contributing to the conversation, because there is no conversation. It's all about oneupmanship (or however it's spelled). It's about a better, more sarcastic comment then the one before. It's about popularity among people we don't even know. It's about bragging rights to who, I don't even know. I don't go bragging about comments I make here, at digg, or any other place I visit.
Social networking is about networking and being social, getting to know people and networking with them. It's right in the name.
Help forums and mailing lists are more social networking than these web 2.0 sites.
One of the original sites to promote user created and sponsored content, succumbed to insipid infighting and trolling once a few decided to game the queue voting system. Suddenly who got voted to the front page had more to do with who was friends with whom, and nothing to do with the content and writing of the article in question. And so K5 began its slow slide to oblivion, the endgame of which we see today. Certainly much blame deserves to be placed at the feet of rusty and his admins. But only in so far as they refused to police the site, not out of a direct attempt to control the voting process.
Perhaps this is a lesson to those of us who had hoped the egalitarian internet we remember from the late '80s and early '90s might somehow scale to the general public. It didn't.
IOW: people suck.
-anonymous for a reason...
Sure, we see a great straw man drawn for us, but I don't see evidence that this is occuring. Does the author maintain there is a conspiracy against users like P9? What evidence is there for a conspiracy? Where are the conspirators meeting? There should be evidence of people meeting in other forums to conspire to bury P9? Is it possible that P9s stories he dugg up suck? I think all these things need to be considered, but I don't see any critical thinking done.
On a similar note, even though the author can dream up a scheme that might possibly bury Digg, is there evidence that an entity has gamed digg as he has explained? Maybe it seems possible that someone could grab 100 C class addresses to create 100 users and they could moderate someone into purgatory, is that all it takes? Has someone ran this experiment to verify that this is true? I don't know why someone could not run this experiment to see if what the author asserts could be true. This article seems more hyperbole and anecdotal in its evidence of gaming the system. For one, if it was possible to game digg, then why not setup a company to do so and make a little money? I imagine there are marketting companies that game all the systems. Just the fact that some people will take this article as true when it doesn't back up its assertions with evidence is an example of gaming. After all, the article is a diss against digg and I am sure some readers use it to back up their own notions that digg sucks. That sounds like gaming to me.
If your readers don't think critically about the content they consume, then you can take your pick of fallacies like generalization and straw man to write up an article that people will take as true. Isn't that gaming the system or the reader? I am not sure if Kevin Mitnick was known for his great technical hacking, but he was definitely known for his great social hacking of people that would willingly give up their passwords.
But your sub-titles recently, like "Web-Two-Point-Doh," have been really, really clever. Not that you need an idiot like me to tell you that, but I figure I give you eds enough (deserved) grief day-to-day it's only proper that I hand out a compliment on the (rare) occasion it is merited. And since the tags are among the few places here where you guys actually have the opportunity to inject some personality, I am gratified to see that at least one of you has one.
Good on ya, bud.
Because the moderator is a moron.
When I drive down the street I trust that the people on the sidewalk will not suddenly leap in front of my car or I would have to drive everywhere at 5 mph.
With similar examples too numerous to mention we can confidently establish that trust has to be greater than zero for a viable existence.
The question of life then is, how much greater than zero? And when do we cut it off? etc.