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.
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.
Unlike Slashdot, which exists so that people can easily tell each other off. Moron.
http://outcampaign.org/
Here is a simple explanation with pictures of the observed phenomenon.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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...
I tried Digg for a while but ultimately gave up - and I think it is because they trust the user too much. Though the average Slashdot discussion is well short of, say, an academic journal, even the worst Slashdot discussion I've read was better than the best Digg one. I'm not trying to troll: I'll explain. Allowing everybody to moderate every post of every discussion, in my experience, results in a discussion that reflects the views of the majority by silencing the views of the minority. You may disagree, but I find that Slashdot moderators put more thought into how they shape the discussion - I know that I will mark a post insightful if it shows insight, regardless of whether I agree. Furthermore, leaving the majority of Slashdot posts remain unmoderated allows more room for both sides of the debate to be heard. I know, I know, proper tweaking of settings on both Digg or Slashdot can reduce some of these problems, but in the balance between trusting the user with too much control over the conversation and too little, I think Slashdot is a lot closer to optimal.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.