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."
It seems like it's questioning it's existence.
Digg exists so that people can easily tell each other what they want to hear. Sometimes it's cool, sometimes it's bogus. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I remember once Quark had a teacher at Lobeling's (or somewhere) who trusted him to look after a room in his absence (or something). Only this teacher had pictures in his draw. Pictures of said teacher, romping with fully-clothed females! Needless to say, Quark did what any responsible young Ferengi would do in those circumstances: blackmailed his teacher into an A grade.
Maybe they could add a reputation system!
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
Here is a simple explanation with pictures of the observed phenomenon.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
The internet as we know it is still a baby. As new ideas happen and are implemented, the processes will be refined in some way. Here's a page that explains how such a system can evolve. First a small set of mods, then more, then BAD MODS NO, and metamoderation happened. Bad users on /. are unable to post, etc...
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.
I ignore the home page and just check out the day's most popular page once or twice a day:
http://digg.com/view/technology/popular/today
It's not the front page of the NY Times and it's no doubt influenced by the much lamented front-page gaming, but I still usually find one or two interesting things that I hadn't heard about yet.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
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...
Pessimal: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? your grace."
Vimes: "I know that one. Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal."
Pessimal: "Ah, but who watches you, your grace?"
Vimes: "I do that, too. All the time."
From Thud!
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.
Snotman wants evidence of social gaming. Evidence of past behavior abounds. First, let's reiterate the potential problem. From the Fine article:
Register them on Digg. Have them randomly digg 5 stories a day. Then scrape the top 100 users on Digg, and add them randomly across the 100 fake users. Simmer for a week or 3, and then *bam* - start reporting any story dugg by the top 100 users as inaccurate.
The ease of creating a botnet of Windoze machines eliminates all evidence. Instances of actually catching a company hired troll like Barkto are rare. Even obvious astroturf, like the M$ PR created Apple Switcher are hard to detect. If that's not proof enough for you that some dishonest companies are abusing the net for there advantage, I'm not sure what is. Oh yeah, you can look up the court proven public disinformation campaign against DRDOS by M$.
As for evidence of gaming sites like Slashdot, visit these these losers one day. Use a text browser and a condom or you might walk off with more than you want.
Yes, it's pathetic but people do that kind of thing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I can. You create a web of reputation.
Every relationship between two individuals has a reputation or weight. As people interact the weights between them get stronger or weaker. Give preference to stories which are recommended by people with a strong reputation with you, get rid of stories recommended by people with a weak reputation. As they decide to like/dislike stories the weights change. As someone attempts to manipulate the system they will simply reduce the weights they have with other individuals and reduce their own influence.
Not easy to do mind you, it's an n^2 problem. Hmm, n^2 problems can often be simplified by cutting them in half, what's needed is a reputation server.
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