The problem with the human condition is that it involves humans. Bringing that condition online, fostering it with the Wisdom of Crowds philosophy, is slowly but surely proving what philosophers have said since humans first learned to write: the anonymous mob is powerful and passionate, but no more rational than an angry swarm of bees.
Wisdom of Crowds Is Dead
Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. – Friedrich Nietzsche.
Why the philosophy lesson? Well, I was reading Neil Patel’s post at Search Engine Land on “How Not To Be Buried on Digg.” Adding his research to Danny Sullivan’s advice on how to baby-sit Digg burials, we know certain things:
Diggers don’t like SEO/SEM or online marketing articles and make great efforts to bury them and label them as spam – whether they are or not.
Diggers don’t like articles about Microsoft or Sony – no self-respecting post-adolescent geek would like them. Microsoft and Sony get the same treatment as SEO.
Digger’s don’t actually read the articles they’re voting on, but base their digging on the title and description alone. Instead of the articles, they read other Digger’s comments and decide who is the geek-chic’est.
Patel, who is doing well in his SEO wager with Jason Calacanis, then proceeds with advice about how to trick Diggers into digging your stories. Diggers don’t trust anybody over 30, so appear youthful and be funny when possible. Cuz these guys are silly, and you’ll need to be silly too.
And I thought to myself: What a sad position to be in. People with legitimate content, looking to maximize traffic find themselves having to pander to what’s become the Web’s In-Crowd. It’s true, we all want to be in there, but there are rules, even if the rules seem arbitrary and ill-informed.
It’s also true that we have to be there. We have to be present to get ahead — it’s exactly like the hated good ol’ boy system.
Is this what Digg has become? A social news clique; the reversed reincarnation of 80’s movie villain jocks and their cheerleader girlfriends; Squealers walking on their hind legs?
Don’t answer that. I like Digg, I really do. And I like Wikipedia. Both are great concepts, great information sources – as long as you don’t mind that one community is gated, and the other community is, like humans, often wrong.
I’m not the first to make this declaration about the herd. Aristotle, Nietzsche, Thomas Jefferson and I, if alive at the same time, would have been drinking buddies – probably with the guy that drew this cartoon.
But when you cover this industry, you notice patterns: mature professionals lowering their denominators for the latest buzz-builders; Wikipedia vandals proving the need for something more structured like Citizendum; Facebook users staging revolts because they don’t understand public information isn’t private.
Google, originally a fan of crowd wisdom, learned its lesson the hard way. Links were scored heavily in the algorithms until the crowd abused them with link spam. Now it’s authority Google’s after more than apparent popularity. I think we’ll see a greater emphasis on authority in other Web places in the future.
Wisdom of crowds, indeed. Hopefully this Wikipedia page, which outlines failures of crowd intelligence – too homogenous, too centralized, too imitative, too emotional – won’t be changed before you get to see what I saw.
Humbly submitted by the elitist, iconoclastic, egghead jerk that I am.
