The perversion of popularity ranks
A couple of years ago, when digg was launched and wasn't anywhere as popular as now, it was quite interesting to have a look there. It was more or less like an assortment of random stuff, quite oriented towards technical matters, so was an easy way of reading different things without having to jump from one page to another.
Some time after, lots of people discovered about the site, it got popular, and people began to submit lots of content only for the sake of increasing traffic to their websites. It was when we began to get bombarded with the advice of so-called experts advising on how to title a blog post with the only purpose of inducing people to click it, bookmark it and all that, and so we ended with these symptoms.
More or less at the same time, del.icio.us discarded their old style front page (which used to show the recently added bookmarks) and chose to show the most popular posts. You could still look for the just-posted stuff but it wasn't that accessible. This led to people coming to del.icio.us, seeing the popular stuff (which usually was designed with the purpose of being bookmarked, see above) and bookmarking it again, which made it rank even higher.
Parallel to all this, bloggers with a desire to blog about fresh news kept using digg and del.icio.us as their main sources. This creates a feedback loop in which stuff which was already popular gets even more popular and can even manage to appear in more traditional websites such as Slashdot or The Register.
I thought that the trend would stop at digg but unfortunately it didn't. New websites flourished, based on the same pattern, such as dzone, a digg for developers. As expected, at the beginning it had very good content, and now I'm seeing more and more of those "50 must have tools for developers", "4 languages you need to know", "15 css tricks that increased my sex appeal" or "30 tutorials for free" on the front page one day and the next one as well.
At the end, mediocrity gets promoted to an unforeseen level of popularity, internet is polluted with crappy wannabe content, and I sorely have to lament the demise of yet another website which looked good.
How sad!
Rick Ross
20070718
Hi Soledad,
I can relate to the feelings you express in this blog, but I do think there's an important question to ask anyone who hopes for social bookmarking to produce "good" results: Have you voted on upcoming links to select the ones you think are best?
The simple, fundamental truth is that most users expect to be passive consumers of the filtered results produced by someone else. It just doesn't work that way, but you can have a LOT of influence on what gets promoted if you merely spend a couple of minutes voting things up or down in the queue of new stories.
If there's a demise to lament, it should be the demise of active participation. The web is not television (thank goodness), and social filtering depends on a small but significant number of people taking an active role. The numbers are really shocking - the vast majority are just there to consume. If more people vote just occasionally, then everyone gets better and more actively filtered results.
Best regards,
Rick
HappyWebCoder
20070718
Hehe, maybe it's not the best moment to recommend you this post… but I do it anyway! ;)
More seriously now, I agree with you: when a democratic site turns mainstream the links, news and comments are mostly useless and It's time to look for some new-marginal-delicatessen sites.
sole
20070718
Hey Rick … surprising to see you here :-)
Of course I vote on content but it's almost useless when there's only a handful of people interested in relevant content and a big percentage of people interested in superficial content. Sometimes, they don't even follow and read the upcoming links, they vote by reading the title only. It's like voting on a book because it has a title you like (or dislike, depending on the case).
HappyWebCoder heh ;-) a bit too much 19-titles-blah but it has good points.
m@cs
20070722
I don't like digg or del.icio.us, or anything like that. perhaps because i'm too old for all this -been into the net since 1994-.
if I like to read the news, I go to bbc, if I like to get the weather, i go to meteocat, if I like to search the web, i use google -without i-google, obviously-.
I never liked the so called portals, they remind me of the one-4-all remotes, you have a little bit of each of your devices, but not all of each one.
Again, perhaps, I'm wrong, but I'm not into facebook or myspace or even secondlife.
I do blog -well, sort of- but I've been doing this long before even the word blog was created so…
Don't you worry, ppl are more stupid than what you think they are, so, sh*t stuff will be more popular than good one, but, as usual, we all know what the best is barely ever the popular… :D