5 Votes
Wisdom of Mobs
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Inspiration for Web 2.0 comes largely from intentions and interests of the crowd. This theme has driven nearly every major site over the past five years. And there is evidence that crowd-driven content is highly successful. Every now and then, that notion gets attacked but recently Drew Curtis, the founder of the Fark website, railed against the crowd harshly. What’s interesting about his tirade is that Fark is entirely dependent on crowd-sourced news aggregation. “The ‘wisdom of the crowds’ is the most ridiculous statement I’ve heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,” Curtis said. “It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.” He alludes to his own users as well as sites set up for government feedback like America Speaking Out which sought content directly from citizens – a site apparently largely littered with nonsense, illogical arguments and very little fact. Will true media just have to wait out the 2.0 craze before revealing itself again as the researching and reporting professionals they were/are?
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Curtis is wrong by scottb
First, he clearly doesn’t understand the concept behind “the wisdom of crowds”. The idea was created specifically to distinguish a certain kind of collective intelligence that’s different from “crowd psychology”, which is largely the source of crowds being “dumb”.
YouTube doesn’t work because of “editors”, the editors are just more people in the crowd. The good stuff gets voted up, mentioned to friends, and generally gets lots of views. The junk languishes. Wikipedia is another example—the editors are the crowd.
The kinds of information aggregation that show the “wisdom of crowds” effect do require some structure (something that filters and combines the individual contributions), but pretending that it’s some secret “power behind the throne” effect is just wrong.
The book that made the idea relatively well-known had several examples where the “wisdom of crowds” was very effective. A crowd of random people at a county fair guessed the weight of an ox. So did several experts. The average of the onlookers guess was closer to the actual weight than any of the experts.
The most powerful example is the futures market, which consistently predicts future prices of goods far more accurately than any other method. The idea has been adapted for use in predicting other sorts of future outcomes, too—elections, discoveries, and so on. Futures markets generally outperform alternative efforts at prediction.
I’ve never spent any time on Fark and I don’t know how it works. On the other hand, sites like Digg and Slashdot seem to do a pretty effective job at harnessing the “wisdom of crowds” for the same purpose.
Pointing out a couple of badly conceived political web sites doesn’t really make the case he’s trying to argue.
Great article on Comment-spam, but not all of Web 2.0 is comment based. by Anonymous
While I agree that comments are generally viewers “sounding off” and not a discussion, comments are the same and at the same time far different than forums, wikis, or videos.
All of them can have a lot of drivel. As the sayings go, “because you can doesn’t mean you should”, and “best to keep opinions to yourself and look a fool, rather than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
But the lure of the Internet is simple: traditional media is very much one-sided. No one cares what Joe Blow’s opinion is on TV, and that much is made very clear, just as long as they can push content in front of him to manipulate their opinion (Entertainment programs, Advertising, Network News, etc.) for whatever reason.
If Joe Blow wants to do “hit and run” opinion, comments are that realm. Fire off, unload your ills, and never read the page again. And online, you can do just that. Even if you thoughts aren’t “well-read” or show that you’re an “expert” on the subject. (And no one is an expert on everything, despite what forum trolls tell you.)
Forums and Wikis are not as inundated as comments are with hit-and-run posts: in forums, the communities are typically self-selecting, and people reply to the comments left with what’s appropriate to their ‘conversation’. If you’re not adding to it, you’re ignored, or at the worst moderated if people aren’t interested in what you’re saying. Crowd-centric communities do manage to bring in other posters and ostracise those with nothing useful to say. (But for every success story, there’s an abomination, like 4chan, or the World of Warcraft forum.)
I think the best example of crowd-based work is the simple Wiki. They have another feature neither forums or comments have: reversion. If someone hasn’t read Godwin’s Law and does a hit-and-run edit calling Mel Gibson a Nazi sympathesizer in Wikipedia (which he may be, but let’s say that it’s not sourced in any relevant news and not appropriate to add to an encyclopedia), an editor can, in a timely manner simply revert the edit to the prior content, sans Nazi. While there’s errors abound in Wikipedia, it’s managed to keep most of the encyclopedia free of every other word containing references to body parts and sex acts.
As for videos, I feel the prior comment covered that well enough. Sink or swim. Good content is shared, bad or average content is ignored, but so long as everyone gets their 15 minutes, right?