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March 01, 2007
The problem with socialism
The problem with socialism: "What you tax you get less of; what you subsidize you get more of." WIRED investigates four techniques to manipulate social media: bloc-voting ("the buddy system"); spam ("geek baiting"); professional relationship specialists ("network for hire"); and manipulation of metrics ("pump-and-chump"). It's easy to design a machine -- it just sits there and does the same thing over and over. But a social organism learns and will change its behavior, so keeping the rules minimal and sustainable lets members pay more attention to the environment than to the system. An ecology of many competing ideas tends to evolve more appropriately than does a large central infrastructure... the latter just naturally draws gaming attempts.
Michael Arrington notes that this article does disclose that WIRED owns a Digg competitor, but believes that the pattern of behavior is predatory: "But my bigger problem is that Wired isn't simply reporting news about Digg. They're making the news. And they're going negative." That problem is an old one... as media channels become more important they become more valuable, more targeted for gaming. We need ideas from the edges, in order to keep from hallucinating about the system.
On that note, let's see how quickly this WIRED story gets voted down on Digg... and let's see how Digg members (or competitors) evolve to spend more time looking out than in.
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 1, 2007 02:51 PM
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Comments
Hi John,
Your first link goes to the USA Today PhotoShop story, not to WIRED.
Thought you'd like to know,
-Randy
[jd sez: ack, thanks Randy... I've been doing more in Safari lately, but that post I did in Firefox... will change, thanks.]
Posted by: Randy Nielsen at March 1, 2007 04:25 PM