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Trusting Users Too Much

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the web-two-point-doh dept.

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."

3 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Something I think most of us can say: by rwven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. It's not gaming and it's not social networking by needacoolnickname · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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.

  3. This happened to kuro5hin five years ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...