Jeffro's Net Adventure

The Guardian did a pretty decent job of interviewing Jay Adelson today. Jay is the CEO of Digg and co-founder of the video podcasting outfit Revision 3. Personally, I would have like to see the Guardian broach some of the developmental aspects of Revision 3, but learning a bit more about Digg was interesting, as well.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Digg on a number of levels. I love it as a news source, but I hate it as a community to interact with. I’m a firm believer in the concept of “wisdom in crowds,” one of the founding principals of Digg. It has very solid statistical roots, is a very old concept, and in most cases work. Unfortunately, I think that Digg, for a while now, has been headed in a direction that breaks the “wisdom of the crowds” paradigm (and I’m not talking about bugs in the system that may make Digg subject to gaming). To understand why I think it is broken, I’m going to have to engage in a short history lesson; bear with me.

The anecdote that is the genesis for the concept of wisdom of crowds I’ve heard many times over is the story of scientist and statistician Francis Galton from the late 1800’s, who was surprised that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered weight of an ox. What made it interesting was not that any one individual came close to guessing the actual weight, but that the crowd did. When their individual guesses were calculated to the median, the resulting number was much closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most individual crowd members, and perhaps most surprisingly also closer than any of the estimates made by cattle experts. Bringing it around to Digg, the idea is amongst the 21.5 million unique users to Digg per month, the wisdom of the crowds will tend to dictate that the most important, relevant, and interesting stories will rise to the top.

There’s a distinct difference, though, in what Digg tries to utilize the Wisdom for, and how the Wisdom was discovered in the first place. On Digg, what answers are being solved? The hypothetical question with only subjective answers. In Galton’s case, where the Wisdom was discovered, it was a very objective answer that was being sought. The answer wasn’t what most folks would *like* the butchered weight of the ox to be, it was what it actually is.

Another place I think the Wisdom is being misapplied is in that even if you think you can apply Wisdom to a subjective answer situation, you aren’t using a true crowd in Digg’s case. They’re trying to apply sound business strategy to a situation where philosophical questions should take priority, as is evidenced towards the end of the interview when the Guardian asks what Digg is doing to protect their various verticals. “There’s value in vertical focus, [and] there may be a vertical we choose not to go into. I would rather empower someone else to go down that route rather than do it myself,” said Adelson.

But by limiting Digg to certain niches (like technology news, or only certain types of media advantageous to the interlocking board members of the company with organizations like Rev3 and Pownce), you’re limiting your crowd to folks only interested in the niches and mediums you’ve defined as important. Galton didn’t survey just experts - it was everything from the scullery maid down to the butcher who probably had a much better idea. The Wisdom arose from the average of the stupid guesses to the educated ones.

Climbing out of the world of hypotheticals and philosophy, and into the real world for a moment, I’ll use an example from my life. A very good friend of mine, one with conservative viewpoints, recently made several comments on an article that, if memory serves, had to do with Al Gore and global warming (or maybe it was partial birth abortions - all I remember is that it was a hot-button topic, and that the premise of the article was based on completely fabricated facts).

I watched the comments build up starting from about minute two or three from the story being posted to Digg. Overwhelmingly, the comments were coming from those of a liberal bent, agreeing blindly with the article without doing a lick of homework to check out the facts involved (a lot of back slapping, Bush-bashing, and Christian-hating took place). My friend tried several times to engage other commenters on the issues of substance the article raised, questioning the authenticity of the facts and such. My friend is a very well-spoken individual, not known for a propensity for vulgarity or smug commentary, yet consistently his comments were “dugg down,” by the herd mentality, without so much of a substantive debate taking place.

Here’s my point (and I do have one): if you pull your entire crowd from which you wish to derive Wisdom from the same monoculture, it will skew your median results toward a place that is very unwise. Based on the strategy Adelson divulges in the Guardian interview, everything Digg does to upgrade the system moves towards further niching and herding of it’s users into smaller and smaller monocultures, thus further diluting the system’s Wisdom.

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