« No ads for porn | Main | Outsourcing imports »
September 07, 2006
MeMeme II
MeMeme II: Kevin Rose of Digg talks about anti-gaming measures here -- to avoid cabals of members promoting each others' posts, Digg will prioritize diverse recommendations, and penalize those who vote for personalities instead of content. Digg still has a problem of being a centralized prize, though... like Wikipedia or Memeorandum, Digg is a winner-take-all system of getting attention, and so the incentives for abuse will remain strong. I suspect we'll eventually evolve social software to recognize affiliation patterns, like Digg is using, but then to use those identified groups as filters to view the world as others do... a preset to view the "top diggers' view of Digg" or "my buddy group's view of Digg"... to view Wikipedia without material under constant reversion wars... to view TechMeme without the linkbaiters. This first generation of "social software" is great for allowing anyone to contribute, but the flip side of freedom of association is freedom of disassociation, the ability to avoid the people we find counterproductive. Digg's identification of collusive posting patterns seems another step to that eventual destination. Summary: For future application development, particularly that which uses "people power" to create or refine content, I don't think "who the system trusts" will be as important as "who does each person trust"... the applications which first help people to find personally relevant information will spark a tremendous advance for us all, I think.
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 7, 2006 06:41 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/7734