User-Generated Content: The Good, The Bad, and The Netscape.com
Community. Social. User-generated content. These are the words that surround many of today’s most popular sites, but what happens when these words turn negative and the social community that creates user-generated content gets out of control? I wrote “Looking For Pr0n? Netscape.com Can Set You Up” to demonstrate when the community aspect of your site can backfire on you.
The community has turned on Digg at times, but not enough to warrant any major changes or effect it’s growing popularity. I don’t think 98% of the Digg community cares who the top Diggers are or why they are always on the frontpage. What Digg has to worry about though is what happens when those top Diggers start to post crappy content continuously.
Sure it’s a democratic system so bad content shouldn’t filter to the top, but if you know anything about gaming Digg, you know that all you need is a couple influential Diggs and you are on the homepage. Just goes to show that no system is really democratic and no matter what a group of individuals can seize control of the majority of the system. You see it on Wikipedia as well.
Is there a perfect solution to this? Not in my mind because you will always have certain members that are more dedicated to the site than others. Thing is though anybody has the power to either become part of the elite or form another group to take over the stop spot. That’s what makes these democratic systems.
It would be nice if Diggers could vote/digg on the rules for an item going on the front page, the UI would look a bit like a smart folder on OS X, but only the “filters” with the most diggs would be active. Anyone could submit a new filter/rule e.g. “News item must be 1 days old and have 100 diggs” and then diggers would vote on it.
By Tom on October 9, 2006 7:03 am
Interview with 9rules…
Paul “Scrivs” Scrivens is a co-founder of the 9rules Network. Visit his professional blog here and personal blog here. What is 9rules, and how did it all get started? The simple answer is to say we are a content……
By Folksonomy.org on October 15, 2006 12:26 am
Yes, every system has its own flaws but as users and participants we got to look at the overall benefits that the system provides to the community and take action only when the community suffers as whole.
By Anshul on October 15, 2006 4:36 am