The venerable social news service Digg has a problem. As Alternet reports, a team of conservative users have been gaming the system for years through an organized effort to vote down news items contradictory to their ideology. Recently, Jezebel.com looked into the outward hostility to women from members of the boys-club userbase, which posts headlines and comments filled with frat-house misogyny. On a network that has long claimed to democratize the news, it’s looking like a selective group is calling the shots. And that’s a problem.
Or is it? New online services are launched all the time--is there anything wrong with a single social news site that only caters to a limited demographic? There are certainly plenty of other competitors available. Perhaps the problem is actually in the company’s messaging--Digg frames itself as a democratic news service for a diverse array of users, but has courted an overwhelmingly young white male user base through marketing efforts such as the party-hardy, dude-centric tech news podcast Diggnation.
If Digg is content with being the news source for young white dudes into Ron Paul and modding their Xbox’s, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. What is alarming for news wonks like myself is that these are problems any social news service could fall victim to. The rhetoric Digg espouses is common: Your peers will be the editors, they argue--this is an age of media for the people, by the people! But such lofty ambitions/grandiose marketing claims are often undermined by very human failings. Some users game the system, while racial, economic or gender-based demographic biases among the users affects what news gets pushed to the top of the heap.
Gaming is an ever-present problem, not only for Digg, but any online service that tracks mass user activity to determine relevance. (Remember the Google bombs of years past?) Improvements to algorithms--and occasionally some quietly-placed human editors--have made it harder to game these systems, but as this latest Digg controversy demonstrates, it’s still possible for an organized campaign among users to undermine a purportedly democratic social network.
Interestingly, Digg’s upcoming version 4 will take cues from Twitter and Facebook, shifting the focus to items that your personal network is sharing and voting up, instead of the user base as a whole. It’s an aggressive move, made not only to mitigate the effects of gaming, but also to make up ground lost to Twitter and Facebook. But this model presents another potential downside to news selected by our personal social networks, the dreaded echo chamber. Proponents of the echo chamber theory argue that when we rely on our own online affinity groups for our news, we encounter fewer conflicting or challenging viewpoints.
Are these problems with actual solutions, or merely the cost of doing business in the new media world? Is it possible to run a single broadly democratic social news site without being undermined by gaming or demographic bias? Can we self-select our sources without entering an echo chamber? The debate is fierce: engineers argue that better algorithms can overcome user shenanigans. Some dispute whether the echo chamber exists. And free-market advocates will state that if Digg doesn’t serve certain groups, competing services will arise to fill the need.
I’m optimistic about the user-curated future of news, but I find these questions difficult to untangle. Attempts to game the systems are usually thwarted, whether by the engineers or good old-fashioned journalism, like the aforementioned Alternet expose. The second and third questions prove more vexing. From my own anecdotal experience, the news and opinion I get from the 600 people I follow across various social networks is consistent with my general political sensibility, leading me to suspect there is some truth to the echo chamber theory. More alarmingly, I’ve yet to see a social news site that caters to a marginalized group reach the critical mass of users that is necessary to maintain momentum and user engagement.
One thing is clear: as I’ve covered in previous posts about Flipboard and Google Reader, socially-curated news feeds aren’t the future, they’re an integral part of the media world we already live in. And if we are all now editors, we all have to be ombudsmen as well, constantly asking these tough and uncomfortable questions about how and where we’re getting and sharing our news.
Comments
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 08.08.10, 8:02pm:
This got me to remembering James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds." He argues that in the right circumstances, groups are "smarter than the smartest people in them." So, yay for sites like digg. But that "right circumstances" part turns out to be rather important. According to the evidence he presents in the book, you can't just throw random people into a real or virtual room together and expect good things to happen.
"The best way for a group to be smart is often for everyone in it to think and act as independently as possible," he writes. "The more influence a group's members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the less likely it is that that group's decisions will be wise ones." And it's also much more possible for groups to game the system, as those conservative white dudes were doing to digg.
Decentralization of the group is therefore crucial, according to Surowiecki, but so is diversity: "Adding a few people who know less, but have diverse skills, actually improves the group's performance."
So though I think Surowiecki would probably think digg and facebook are pretty cool, as do I, a lot of the evidence he presents would seem to argue against both broad-based curation and friend-network curation; both might have corrosive effects on one's ability to make sound decisions--in one structure, the news is too tainted by attempts to game the system; in the other, the news is too narrow.
I don't have a grand structural answer to any of this, but I do feel like I have some individual answers.
One is that we all have a responsibility to use these new tools to bust out of our networks. I put right-wing blogs in my feeds; I try to see what ethnic media and world media sites are saying. You just have to make the extra effort, or you'll never know. Incidentally, I'm not looking to become a Republican; but I am interested in what news their side is highlighting, both for what it reveals that might be hidden from me and for what it reveals about their version of the world.
The other is that I think gatekeepers still matter. In the new media ecology, editors occupy an important niche; so does individual taste. We might think of skilled individual curation as being the judiciary of web 2.0, providing a kind of check against aggregation and algorithms. Crowds may be smarter than individuals, but they're not necessarily more compassionate or even more fun.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 08.08.10, 8:58pm:
BTW, over at our Facebook page, Shareable fan Cecile had this to say: "Perhaps the anonymous poster is a thing of the past. We're having the same problem with our local paper, where rigid, unthinking folk just shred any comments they don't like, causing others to either not read any more or to just give up and not go to the Editorial Forum at all. Racist, hate-baiting remarks turn many off. Having to put your name and zip code to the comments might stop that."
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Paul M. Davis wrote on 08.12.10, 2:23pm:
Interesting points all, Jeremy. I think it's interesting that some of the most mass sites that have implemented social features most successfully have raised the barrier to entry: Metafilter, by charging a one-time $5 fee to join the community and having a robust moderation infrastructure, and Gawker media, which has built a system of trusted commenters who can "promote" or "demote" newer commenters. While the debate remains pretty spirited on these sites, it's generally much more thoughtful and intelligent than what you see on other sites with such a wide readership.
I was pretty interested in this newspaper's move to charge commenters a one-time fee of 99 cents to engage in the site's comment section: http://www.pcworld.com/article/201267/newspaper_charges_to_comment_on_st...
It's interesting to me that the distinction between entertainment, news and socializing is getting harder to make. Does this mean that we're all more informed or that we are clustering off into little echo chambers of our own making?
The other day I de-friended an old school-mate when their political views (and accompanying rants) proved to be too nauseating to endure any longer. I felt like I already knew her stance, I disagreed with it, and didn't want to hear any more.
Seems that we have a shortage of platforms for dialogue (or a reluctance to engage responsibly in difficult dialogue), and an abundance of online soap-boxes. If you don't agree with the angle, you just move on to the next one.
I like to think that we're all looking to a variety of sources for information; using our entertainment and social sites as lead-ins to more responsible and reliable news sources, but I'm a bit skeptical. I guess it depends on the person, and the circle of information that they've created.
I also think that this is a very cool time to be alive and helping to shape our new media world.