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November 04, 2006
Necessary opacity
Necessary opacity: Michael Arrington writes of Digg's anti-gaming measures, whose secrecy sounds similar to that of search engines: "As with any community, and probably more so with Digg, tranparency is important. The company continues to be very open in how they evolve and communicate regularly with users via the official Digg blog. But they don't talk specifically about how exactly stories make it to the home page. They say this is to prevent further gaming, which makes sense. But it also has the side effect of causing some users to feel snubbed." With standalone applications or classic web apps all the decision-making was handled in the code. In social systems each participant is a decision-maker, and the system evolves over time, different parts learning from each other. The "source code" of the rules' implementation seems like it would have to be remarkably simple and strong, to be able to be openly published, while still avoiding exploits. Your thoughts...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at November 4, 2006 09:46 AM
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