Marc Fawzi criticises digg for creating crowd-as-bull behaviour. When he published a story that reached digg’s front page, he got 33,000 hits to his site in the first 24 hours, becoming the number one site on WordPress for 16 hours. The digg crowd acted like a mob, but not a smart one. Marc’s admiration for “the wisdom of crowds” took a bit of a beating, understandably enough.
It’s a good post and great food for thought. In the book, James Surowiecki distinguishes between Information Cascades — where everyone follows everyone else — and properly wise crowds — where everyone thinks independently but the “correct answer” is the median of all their responses. I think digg is arguably susceptible to information cascades — for many users, the only stories they see are already on the front page and thus only news that has already been promoted gets promoted further. This can create some quite bizarre valuations for stories.
Evolving Trends — Digg’s Biggest Flaw!
This post explains and demonstrates a real flaw in digg’s service model that helps promote hype on the Web, causing a “dumbing down” effect on culture, with serious consequences to society. Having said that, the experimental evidence and logic supplied here apply equally to other Web 2.0 social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, reddit, and netscape beta.
Share this post:
[…] Marc Fawzi at Evolving Trends attacks the whole notion of the wisdom of crowds. It’s a development of the disappointing experience he had when digg suddenly made him the number one site on WordPress for a short period, apparently on the basis that he had come up with a catchy headline. More on that story below. He concludes that “while a crowd can be a decent calculator of subjective measurable value, it will always produce a dumb choice when it comes to subjective quality” and calls for a return to the old order whereby experienced editors and qualified professionals decided what’s important. […]