March 17th, 2006
When You Empower the Masses
Kudos to Digg CEO Jay Adelson for having a fairly credible perspective on the alleged stock manipulation via stories on Digg (re: Google’s rumored purchase of Sun) that has been causing such a dust-up:
When you’re empowering the mass, you have to be careful about quality control. It would be unfair to label all of Web 2.0 and Ajax and all those technologies as necessarily making gaming easier. However like with any powerful technology, it’s incumbent upon the developers to do a good job of preventing that.
(Via Blogspotting. The stock manipulation accusation was originally leveled by Silicon Valley Sleuth.)
Adelson understands that he’s playing with fire, and they’ve installed fired extinguishers all over Digg:
Now users can bury a story as well as promote it. They can report a story as being ‘lame’, spam, a duplicate story, a bad link, old news or inaccurate. If the system receives enough reports, the story disappears from the home page. If it’s flagged as inaccurate, a warning banner appears at the top of the post.
That said, Adelson is quoted on Silicon Valley Sleuth as saying, “I don’t think it’s possible to game Digg because it requires such a mass of people who have been vetted through our algorithms.”
This smacks of Google’s insistence that they’re on top of click fraud. By “empowering the masses,” Web 2.0 is dealing with an elemental force — human malfeasance. No matter how many barriers you put up, like water, human malfeasance will always seep through.
This is not the fault of Web 2.0, but when you invite the world in, you’re inviting in the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s very 1.0 to think you can keep out the part you don’t want.
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- I’m a regular user of Digg and I will admit I saw the four stories this week about the rumored purchase of Sun by Google ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 )I even thought about posting them here, but something felt “funny” so I held off. … # Publishing 2.0 / When You Empower the Masses - Kudos to Digg CEO Jay Adelson for having a fairly credible perspective on the alleged stock manipulation via stories on Digg (re: Google’s rumored purchase of Sun) that has been causing such a dust-up : …
- I’m a regular user of Digg and I will admit I saw the four stories this week about the rumored purchase of Sun by Google ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 )I even thought about posting them here, but something felt “funny” so I held off. … # Publishing 2.0 / When You Empower the Masses - Kudos to Digg CEO Jay Adelson for having a fairly credible perspective on the alleged stock manipulation via stories on Digg (re: Google’s rumored purchase of Sun) that has been causing such a dust-up : …
‘ to the Web It’s about Howard Get her an editor Yes, it is the French Have Media Companies Learned Anything? Tear up the tracks and the business cards Lesson No. 1 l’affarianna Huffington updateWhen You Empower the Masses
Besides human malfeasance, part of either the “bad” or the “ugly” is when poorly-informed people jump to conclusions without bothering to pick up the phone or even send an email. You’d think in this age of communications options, people might try email!
In fact, that series of stories wasn’t any sort of gaming, malfeasance, or stock manipulation, as everybody who has bothered to look into things has quickly seen. It was only one writer who managed to convince one editor that his speculations were worth submitting to Digg, and then a huge host of people who were intrigued by the ideas.
I thought the speculation was bunkum myself, and would be astounded if Google actually bought Sun (ha!), but spotting bad guys behind every tree doesn’t seem much less harmful to me. After that series of articles hit the front page of Digg, a loosely affiliated group of folks who hadn’t bothered to find out the truth tried to get everybody from Blogcritics.org banned from Digg. Is that human malfeasance? It seems so to me.
The system has issues both ways, and it’s always a balancing act. The fact that banned sites and banned users aren’t publicized, now that’s interesting to me. Suppression of speech is peachy because nobody knows about it, it seems.
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