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Censorship By Glut
from the all-my-ideas-are-brilliant dept.
In a country where you're free to say almost anything in the political arena, I think the only real censorship of good ideas is what you could call "censorship by glut". If you had a brilliant, absolutely airtight argument that we should do something -- indict President Bush (or Barack Obama), or send foreign investment to Chechnya, or let kids vote -- but you weren't an established writer or well-known blogger, how much of a chance do you think your argument would have against the glut of Web rants and other pieces of writing out there? Especially if your argument required people to read it and think about it for at least an hour? Perhaps your situation could be compared to that of a brilliantly talented band submitting a song for Matthew Salganik's experiment.
What Salganik and his co-authors did was recruit users through advertisements on Bolt.com (skewing toward a teen demographic) to sign up for a free music download site. Users would be able to listen to full-length songs and then decide whether or not to download the song for free. Some users were randomly divided into eight artificial "worlds" in which, while a user was listening to a song, they could see the number of times that the song had been downloaded by other users in the same world -- but only by other users within their own world, not counting the downloads by users in other worlds. The test was to see whether certain songs could become popular in some worlds while languishing in others, despite the fact that all groups consisted of randomly assigned populations that all had equal access to the same songs. The experiment also attempted to measure the "merit" of individual songs by assigning some users to an "independent" group, where they could listen to songs and choose whether to download them, but without seeing the number of times the song had been downloaded by anyone else; the merit of the song was defined as the number of times that users in the independent group decided to download the song after listening to it. Experimenters looked at whether the merit of the song had any effect on the popularity levels it achieved in the eight other "worlds".
The authors summed it up: "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible." They also noted that in the "social influence" worlds where users could see each others' downloads, increasing download numbers had a snowball effect that widened the difference between the successful songs and the unsuccessful: "We found that all eight social influence worlds exhibit greater inequality -- meaning popular songs are more popular and unpopular songs are less popular -- than the world in which individuals make decisions independently." Figures 3(A) and 3(C) in the paper show that the relationship between a song's merit and its success in any given world -- while not completely random -- is tenuous. And if you're a talented musician and you want to get really depressed about your prospects of hitting the big time, Figures 3(B) and 3(D) show the relationship between a song's measured merit and its actual number of sales in the real world. (Although those graphs may cheer you up if you're a struggling musician who hasn't made it big yet -- maybe it's not you, it's just the roll of the dice.)
As the Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein put it in their all-around fascinating book Nudge , where I first read about the Salganik study:
In many domains people are tempted to think, after the fact, that an outcome was entirely predictable, and that the success of a musician, an actor, an author, or a politician was inevitable in light of his or her skills and characteristics. Beware of that temptation. Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome. Today's hot singer is probably indistinguishable from dozens and even hundreds of equally talented performers whose names you've never heard. We can go further. Most of today's governors are hard to distinguish from dozens or even hundreds of politicians whose candidacies badly fizzled.
Is the blogosphere, or the "marketplace of ideas" in general, any different? If a random
sample of bloggers were rated based on some independent measure of merit -- for example, independent
ratings from a random sampling of blog readers, who were looking at the bloggers' writing samples
for the first time, analogous to users in Salganik's "independent" world --
and then correlate that with the bloggers' traffic or some other measure of success,
it's not hard to imagine the results would be similar to those of the 8-worlds
experiment: the best often rise to the top, the very worst rarely do, but success in the vast middle
would be close to random. In fact, while music listeners would have no logical reason to
like a song just because others did, users in the blogosphere and other public forums
would have several rational reasons to cluster around writers who are
already popular: (1) errors are more likely to have been spotted and pointed out by someone else;
(2) as an extension of that, others are more likely to have provided comments and other value-added content;
(3) if you are the first person to spot an error, it's more important on a popular blog
to point out the error and stop the misinformation from spreading, than on a minor blog that nobody
has ever heard of. So the "snowball effect" of popularity in the blogosphere would be even more
pronounced.
Then why do so many people believe in what Thaler and Sunstein call the "inevitability" of
success based on merit, in domains like music, politics, and writing? I think it's because the belief
is what scientists call an unfalsifiable one -- if the "best" acts are assumed to be the
ones that end up on the top of the pile, then the marketplace has always sorted the "best" content
to the top, by definition. Since the definition is circular,
the premise could never be disproved by any amount
of counter-evidence -- even if an act that used to be popular, suddenly falls under the radar, that
could be seen as "proof" that they lost whatever magic touch they used to have, not as evidence of
the arbitrariness of the market! The only disproof
would be an artificial experiment like Salganik's, showing that once you get beyond a certain
threshold of quality, commercial success has little relationship to independently measured merit --
but such experiments, which in Salganik's case required the cooperation of over 14,000 users,
don't come along very often. And as long as most people don't realize how arbitrary the existing
marketplaces are, there isn't enough demand to justify building a system that could work better --
indeed, to even justify
asking the question of whether a system could be designed that would work better.
And that, I think, is how "censorship by glut" really works. It's not just the sheer amount
of written content that censors small voices -- if you happen to know about a particular writer that
you consider a fount of wisdom, then the existence of a billion other Web pages won't stop you from
reading that writer's content. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of people who realize
that success can be highly arbitrary.
The problem is that as long as most people assume that the existing marketplace of ideas
does a good job of sorting
the best content to the top, then they'll be more inclined to stay with the most popular news sites
and blogs, and even the minority who know that it's largely a lottery, will have no effective
way of finding the best content among everything else, so they'll end up sticking with the most popular
sites as well.
Worse, as a secondary effect,
most people with something useful to contribute won't even bother, if they don't already have
a large built-in audience. I know
plenty of people who could write insightful essays about social and technological issues, essays
that would give most readers a new perspective such that they would definitely say afterwards: "That
was worth my time to read it." But it
wouldn't be worth it to the writers, because they know that their content isn't going to get
magically sorted
into its deserved place in the hierarchy.
(My own favorite blog that nobody's ever heard of is Seth Finkelstein's
InfoThought, which is usually
logical and insightful and is only about 25% of the time
about how "nobody ever reads this blog, so what's
the point".
His Guardian columns
are also good and usually don't have that subtext, perhaps because it's considered impolite to use
a newspaper's column-inches
(column-centimeters?)
to complain that you have no voice.)
So can this problem be avoided, or is inequality and arbitrariness just a permanent part of the marketplace
for content and ideas? You could create an artificial world that would sort user-submitted content according
to some other algorithm -- and even if it didn't give good writers the fame that they theoretically deserved
in the larger world,
it might still provide them with enough of an audience within the artificial universe, to make it worth their
time to keep writing. One
option would be to use Salganik's "independence" world model, where users would read content without
being able to see the ratings that other people had given to it, or without even seeing recommendations from
similarly-minded friends within the system. The trouble is that without any information about
what other readers liked, without any starting point to sort good content from bad content, it may not be
worth the reader's time to read through all the dreck to find the occasional buried treasure. I believe
about as strongly as a person can believe, that the existing marketplace for content is far from meritocratic,
for example that there are probably thousands of songs on iTunes that I've never
heard of but would nonetheless love --
but even I don't spend time listening to the 30-second clips of random songs on iTunes, because it takes too
long to find the stuff I would like.
But I submit there is a solution -- a variant of an argument that I've suggested for
stopping
cheating on Digg, or building Wikia search into a
meritocratic search engine, or helping
the best writers
rise to the top
on Google Knol. The solution is sorting based on ratings from a random
sample of users. The remainder of this speculation will be very theoretical, and will at times seem
like a Rube-Goldberg approach to what should be a simple problem. But at each juncture, the complications
to the algorithm are motivated by an argument that anything simpler would not work. At many points along
the way, it will be tempting to throw up one's hands and say, "Why go to all this trouble, the existing
system works well enough." But this statement is hard to quantify with any actual evidence -- unless
you're just using the circular definition above, that whatever rises to the top is automatically the "best".
For music listeners, the gist of the algorithm is: When an artist submits a new song
in the alt-rock category for example, the song is distributed to a random sample of 20 users who
have indicated an interest in that genre. If the average rating from those users is high enough, the
song gets recommended to all of the site's users who are interested in alt-rock. If the average rating
is not high enough, then the artist receives a notification, perhaps with a list of comments from the listeners
suggesting what to improve. As long as the initial random sample of users is large enough that the average
rating is indicative of what the rest of the site's alt-rock fans would think, the good content will get
to be enjoyed by all of the site's alt-rock customers, while the bad content would fizzle after only wasting
the time of 20 people. If it turns out that a random selection of 20 users are typically too lazy to rate
the songs that are submitted to them, you could even make artists submit $10 to have their songs rated by
the focus group, and pay each of the 20 raters $0.50 each for their trouble. Artists can't withhold payment
as revenge for a bad rating, so the average ratings should still be proportional to the song's actual quality.
At this point, you might object that this system suffers from the same unfalsifiable, circular reasoning
as the belief
that the marketplace rewards the "best" content, if the best content is the content that wins in the marketplace.
If I define the "best" content to be the content
that gets the highest average score in a random focus group, then of course this algorithm sorts the best
content to the top, because that's how "best" was defined! But this system does actually have a non-trivial
property: If you implement the system in multiple separate "worlds" (similar to those that Salganik created), then
provided your focus groups are large enough to provide representative random samples, the same content should
rise
to the top in each of the worlds, unlike the results in Salganik's experiment.
This actually wouldn't
be the case if the initial focus groups were not big enough -- then random variations in a few voters' opinions
could cause many songs to succeed in one world and fail in another.
So it's a non-trivial property that is not automatically true, and would not be true if you made an error
in designing the system, like making the focus groups too small.
But the larger the size of the random
sample, the smaller the variance in the expected value of the average of their ratings, and the greater
agreement you would expect between the results from different worlds.
As Salganik pointed out to me, this system does under-reward songs that might require repeated listenings over
time to gain an appreciation of their qualities. But even this, strictly speaking, can be modeled in exchange
for cash -- I'll pay 20 users $2 each if they listen to my song once today, once in three days, and once
again a week after that (the site could stream the song to them to provide at least some likelihood that the
users weren't cheating). This assumes some things, such as that repeated exposure has the same
growing-on-you effect even if the exposure is forced -- but in the real world,
songs often grow on you from repeated listenings
that are "forced" anyway, if they're played in the doctor's office or on the radio when you don't bother to
change the channel. And this might be more complicated than necessary -- often when a song grows on you,
it at least interests you enough the first time you hear it, that you'd give it a positive rating on the first
listen, which is all that the site requires for the song's success.
However, if you try to adapt this trick to a meritocracy for written content, you run into different problems.
With a song, if you poll a random sample of users, the odds are very small that anyone being polled will be
a vested interest in the success of the song, like one of the band members or one of the song's producers
(assuming the population of users is large enough, and the song's
producers have not been able to create a huge number of
"sockpuppet"
accounts to manipulate the voting).
So you can assume the ratings will be free of any prior bias.
But with a political post, for example, if you write a
pro-Bush or anti-Bush essay, it's quite likely that among a random sample of users, there will be
people who are biased
to vote up (or vote down) any post that has anything good to say about the President. The essays
voted to the top may not be the best-written ones, but simply the ones that pander to the most popularly held
opinions.
But if the "best" essays are not the ones that receive the highest percentage of positive votes, even
when polling a random sample of independent users -- which I was advocating as the gold standard for measuring
merit -- then how do you define what makes the "best" essays, anyway? There are many possible answers, but
I suggest: A necessary condition for being among the "best" essays would be to convince the most people
of something that they didn't believe before,
without resorting to tricks such as blatantly fabricating statistics or attributing made-up quotes.
This is not a sufficient condition for merit -- maybe the point of view that you're convincing people
of, is still wrong -- but I submit that if you're not at least changing some people's minds, then there's no point.
An essay that changes a lot of people's minds in a random focus group, is usually worth reading, if
only to see why it has that effect.
Unfortunately, this doesn't suggest a better way to poll users about the merit of an essay, because if you
ask users, "Were you a Bush supporter before reading this essay?" and "Were you a Bush supporter afterwards?",
Bush supporters are eventually going to figure out that the way to give the essay a high score on the
mind-changing scale, would be to (falsely) say that they were not a Bush supporter before reading the essay,
but they were one afterwards. So you'd still end up rewarding the essays that reinforce pre-existing opinions
instead of the ones that change people's minds.
From here the counter-measures and counter-counter-measures get increasingly complicated.
For each category of essays that a user
wants to rate, such as Bush opinion pieces, you could require new users to enter their current opinion:
either pro-Bush or anti-Bush. Then if they were asked to rate a pro-Bush essay, they would only be able
to vote that the essay "changed their minds" by switching their registered opinion from "anti-Bush" to
"pro-Bush". But Bush supporters could sign up initially as anti-Bush, just in the hopes of being part of a
random focus group so they could cast their mind-changing vote for a Bush essay by changing their registration
to "pro-Bush"! However, each user would only be able to do that once -- or do you allow users, after they've
switched from anti-Bush to pro-Bush, to "reload" by spontaneously switching back to anti-Bush for no reason
at all, so they're all set to cast a mind-changing vote for the next pro-Bush essay? Or
would they only be allowed to switch back to anti-Bush, by casting a mind-changing vote as part of a random focus
group for an anti-Bush essay -- thus giving a boost to an anti-Bush screed, as part of the price they pay for
the next vote they cast for a pro-Bush piece? Then users could still game the system, by switching to
"anti-Bush" when casting a vote for a very poorly written anti-Bush essay that they don't think
anybody else will vote for anyway,
and then switching back to "pro-Bush" only for the good essays that have a shot, hoping that their votes
will coalesce around the decently-written pro-Bush essays and push them to the front page...
Am I over-thinking this? I submit this is an area where there's been too much under-thinking.
Haven't we all been tempted to believe that the marketplace of ideas -- not to mention bands, blog posts,
and business ventures -- efficiently sorts content to the place in the hierarchy of rewards that it deserves,
without having any real evidence for this, except the circular definition of "quality" as being proportional
to success? And the more people believe this, the more that marginalized voices will effectively be censored,
even when they have something brilliant to contribute. We should at least think about ways that we could
do better. Or else, prove logically that it can't be done (a logical proof can only approximate the real world,
but it could show that such a pure meritocracy would be very improbable, or wouldn't work well). However I think
the ideas above make it seem unlikely that a meritocracy is logically impossible. Maybe they're a step in the
right direction. Maybe someone else's ideas would be better. The important thing is that
a meritocratic algorithm be judged
by something other than a circular definition, which simply decrees by fiat that the winning content is
the best.
Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
... they seek out information that validates their already-existing view of the world. Actual facts and truth might require a painful rewiring of preconceived notions.
The exact same thing can truthfully be said of those on the left of the political spectrum.
Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:5, Insightful)
The exact same thing can be truthfully said of a member in any position of the political spectrum, left, right, up, down, front, and back.
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Parent
Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:5, Funny)
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Parent
Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:5, Funny)
I'm surprised this ever happens. When I hadn't completed high-school, I was still in an apartment. The manor came quite a while after I had been declared a Doctor of philosophy.
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Parent
Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:5, Insightful)
The leftists these days what unified groupthink. The right wingers want everyone to be an individual so long as they are all identical individuals.
I don't know if you have been paying attention to the politics going on lately, but all of the self described "conservatives" have NOTHING to do with any of the values you just described. They pay lipservices to "free market" when what they mean is "corporate welfare for my friends and a playing field that favors the ones that can pay us off". They most certainly do not believe in your free speech rights. "Your either with us or against us" comes to mind. Nevermind all of the rather unflattering things that these people have suggested we do with anyone who would dare question the U.S. Government.
Libertarians are the closest thing to your "classical liberal" out there these days. Both the D and R teams have spun off into nightmarish parties of government consolidated power and control that the only way to tell them apart is by the pillow talk after they are done screwing you.
Fox pulls high numbers because there are a large number of low IQ people floating about that can't be bothered to READ and check sources. Fox is the same group that showed how the "hacker" group anonymous blows up vans... Fox is the same "fair and balanced" that covered Ahmenidjad's speech showing his title as "Axis President" while the other 3 stations said "President of Iran". Fox lead the charge on the bait and switch of Osama vs Iraq. They are a massive propoganda outlet, nothing more, and their reporting on pretty much anything is laughable at best.
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Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Fire in a crowded theater" quote is from Oliver W. Holmes opinion in Shrenck v. United States, which held that the government could outlaw the distribution of pamphlets criticizing the draft during war time. This opinion was also the source of another favorite right wing phrase, the "clear and present danger".
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
The "fire in a theater" and "clear and present danger" have been the touchstones for the right wing when it comes to suppressing what they consider unpatriotic speech. Lately these more erudite phrases have fallen into disfavor, in favor of a simpler epithet: traitor.
Holmes' extreme position was later moderated by Brandenberg v. Ohio, in which the court held that only incitement to immediate illegal action could be barred. This represents the current position of most liberals in the US with respect to "hate speech": that only incitement should be made publicly illegal. WIthin private institutions, different standards and values apply.
In any case, note that our right wing victim is playing bait and switch with us here. There are no "hate speech" laws in the United States for him to be victimized by. He's also confusing the situation Canada, particularly the distinction between national hate speech laws and regional tribunals. The tribunals have indeed stepped over the reasonability line in some cases, although it is a bit paranoid to call them " kangaroo courts to suppress free speech and the free exchange of ideas".
Advocating genocide or hatred against a group is not exactly the "free exchange of ideas"; I wouldn't dignify bigotry with the name. It's just that you can't outlaw stupidity, you can only drive it underground. It is not the utility of bigotry that must be preserved, but its visibility.
In that, Brandenberg may have got it right. If you expect, as a direct consequence of your speech, that others will commit a crime, you may well be a participant in that crime. If you get up in front of an angry mob and say, "So and so at 123 Maple Street is a black man who raped white girls," knowing full well that the result will be a lynch mob, that is not about expressing ideas, it's about seeing that somebody gets lynched without getting your fingerprints on it.
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It's Called "Mob Mentality" (Score:5, Interesting)
However, it's good to see it being properly analyzed. I'll need at least an hour to think about this.
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NO SHIT (Score:4, Insightful)
slashdot moderation much?
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You keep using that word, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
a: the institution, system, or practice of censoring
b: the actions or practices of censors ; especially : censorial control exercised repressively
Which is not the same thing as people going with the flow, and acting like the rather lazy pack/herd animals that hundreds of millions of years of evolution has wired up.
Having a great idea that you express below the Signal-to-Noise threshold is not the same as being censored.
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Re:You keep using that word, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's saying a lot about how people take freedom of speech for granted when someone writes a paper about how unpopularity is a form of censorship.
Censorship is not when people don't want to read or hear about your idea. Censorship is when people can't read or hear about your idea because someone intentionally prevents it.
A crappy blog not getting many pageviews is not censorship. Men in black knocking down your door and hauling you away so you stop writing your crappy blog is.
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Maybe I misread it (Score:4, Informative)
But it seems like the real problem he's trying to solve is that current ranking algorithms don't take into effect the fact that "users" are not one segment, but rather composed of different segments with differing political, religious, sexual, ethnic, etc. tastes. That is to say, Digg's algorithms are very good if you match a stereotypical Digg profile. If you weren't, well, it wasn't so amazing.
However, this is _hardly_ an unexplored area, and I would further submit that _Amazon_ is surprisingly good at this kind of thing. By analyzing what random samples of users bought (or, in other cases, ranked up or down), they're able to make (IMHO) often-insightful recommendations about what else you should buy. I've had thoughts about how you could make a site that would kick Digg's ass and probably be more valuable to advertisers using tagging, ranking, and some statistics, too.
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That's Not Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
The failure of a group of people to communicate well does not constitute "censorship". Censorship is when someone or something selects communications for suppression. But when a room is too noisy for someone to be heard, that's not censorship. Unless a person or a group of people arranges for rooms to be noisy, with the plan to drown out some people.
If the "censorship" is selective only of arbitrary communications, not according to content or meaning, but only according to signal strength or random chance, that's not "censorship". It should be fixed, but calling it "censorship" just makes it harder to deal with actual censorship.
We have loads and loads of actual censorship, especially on the Internet. We should care about stopping censorship. So we shouldn't just call any failure to communicate "censorship", which makes it harder to communicate about censorship or the other interference, and therefore harder to fix either.
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It is censorship, Brave New World style (Score:5, Informative)
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If you ever lived in a foreign country (Score:5, Informative)
and the US, and watched the evening news - you definitely get a feel that the evening news in America is censored. This is not so much because the hide stories, but just the lack of airtime for most anything worthwhile, while fluff (Arnette's cat gets in a tree and rescued by firefighter, college sports) dominates. International events don't tend to be covered at all, unless it is really grand or some type of American involvement (1000 people die, including 12 American, etc).
Now, I don't think this is a grand conspiracy, but it does have a dumbing down effect - I don't know if it came about because of viewer demand or a few program managers dictating what gets broadcast and other stations imitating them. In the evening news in Canada, UK, France, Germany (countries I personally traveled to) - there is definitely more awareness of what is going in internationally (or even nationally).
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Re:If you ever lived in a foreign country (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.S. is so large and economically dominant that it's very easy to live here without ever knowing what's going on in the outside world at large. Very few things that happen abroad have a noticeable effect here. The U.S. has a GDP of $14 trillion, but imports and exports account for just $3.1 trillion, a 4.5 to 1 ratio. (Please note that GDP is gross domestic product and calculates exports minus imports, not the sum of imports and exports.)
It's very different elsewhere. Most countries are small or have significant economic ties to their neighbors. Canada has a GDP of $1.3 trillion, with imports and exports accounting for $850 billion in trade - a 1.5 to 1 ratio. Germany has a $2.6 trillion GDP vs. $2.1 trillion in foreign trade - a 1.2 to 1 ratio. So international news and events have a much greater impact on their citizens' everyday lives.
That said, I do agree the news broadcasts here are pretty pathetic. It seems the news stations cater to what people want to watch, instead of what's important. In terms of marketability, it would seem the fluff piece about Annette's cat in the tree gets better ratings than coverage about some terrorist attack in Mumbai. It's the only explanation I can think of for the existence of such shows as Jerry Springer.
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the article, abbreviated (Score:5, Insightful)
"Popular people get noticed. Unpopular people don't. Sorry if you're in the second group."
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Merit often has little to do with it (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a certain cliquishness at work in the blogosphere. For example, many of the major bloggers are fairly mediocre writers just like most editorialists fit that mold. There is a feedback effect of the back-and-forth referencing that makes them seem more relevant and better than they really are.
If I had to give one piece of advice to someone that wanted to start blogging today, it would be to simply write for your own enjoyment while making sure that what you write may be beneficial to others if they run across it. Why? Chances are, you won't ever get popular even if you are really good at it. The flaw in the Army of Davids model used to describe publishing content online is that David was very unique, and most people simply aren't that. Even when they are, they're not annointed like David.
I suppose the one thing I'll never understand is why people continue to give a platform to writers like Bill Kristol. There are a lot of them who are just flat out wrong so often that I can't help but think they're a lot like a horoscope, but for politics.
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Social Proof (Score:5, Insightful)
My friends and I call this "Social Proof"
in a nutshell:
Partially due to our fast paced society(or perhaps amplified by it) people cannot take the time to learn about and judge things or people for themselves, so they use social indicators to determine worth.
For example, seeing a well dressed well groomed individual vs their unkempt shabbily dressed twin. People tend to assume much better things about the well dressed twin simply by manner of his appearance.
Another example, if you go out for drinks with an attractive coworker or friend of the opposite sex and the two of you are seen laughing and joking and having fun, your social value is increased in the eyes of the onlookers, they figure if this other person has taken the time to form a positive opinion of you, then you must have some desirable qualities, and they will be more receptive of your attention. This seems to be a mostly subconscious effect.
Before I got married, I used to have several hot chicks that I would go party with, knowing that being out with a hot chick made it easier to pick up other chicks.
People tend to be sheep.
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hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
what is posed as a philosophical breakthrough is simply nothing more than not understandning the goddamn meaning of the word "censorship"
a high noise to signal ratio is not the same thing as censorship
that's some pretty fruitless philosophical gymnastics there son
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Slashdot comments: censorship by glut (Score:5, Insightful)
The Slashdot comments system is a spot-on example of what Haselton describes: if one doesn't manage First Post or relatively close to it, the likelihood that your insightful/informative/funny comment will be widely read and modded-up decreases proportionately. People just don't have the time or stamina to read hundreds of comments, normally; they read just the first few dozen "visible" (highly rated) ones and then quit. If in fact that is the case, then being late to the party means that the quality of your comment is irrelevant because it will be drowned-out by the flood that preceded it. Really it's the people who are able to jump in and suck on the Firehose that get most of the attention here. I've been frustrated by this quantitative factor - what Haselton calls the "glut" - for a long time.
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Rate the raters (Score:4, Interesting)
In answer to the question about how to rate blog essays, I suggest that we need to rate the raters. How do we do that? I think a system can be built into the threads of discussion in response to an essay. If people rate your comment highly, it increases your standing as a rater, and your ratings figure more strongly into the rating metric. But people can't just rate. They must also supply, in the form of a comment, their reasoning behind the rating, which opens their comment and rating to responding comments and ratings, and so on. If people read and understand the terms of comment submission so they know that the point of the site is to rate the quality of reasoning, not the flavor of ideology, the system should correct itself.
Then again, this system assumes that people will behave rationally, which is dubious, as any economist or divorce lawyer will tell you.
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Rating algorithms (Score:4, Interesting)
While I admit I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking or writing about this as Haselton has (he seems to have a great deal of time), I do like this paragraph particularly:
And that, I think, is how "censorship by glut" really works. It's not just the sheer amount of written content that censors small voices -- if you happen to know about a particular writer that you consider a fount of wisdom, then the existence of a billion other Web pages won't stop you from reading that writer's content. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of people who realize that success can be highly arbitrary. The problem is that as long as most people assume that the existing marketplace of ideas does a good job of sorting the best content to the top, then they'll be more inclined to stay with the most popular news sites and blogs, and even the minority who know that it's largely a lottery, will have no effective way of finding the best content among everything else, so they'll end up sticking with the most popular sites as well. Worse, as a secondary effect, most people with something useful to contribute won't even bother, if they don't already have a large built-in audience. I know plenty of people who could write insightful essays about social and technological issues, essays that would give most readers a new perspective such that they would definitely say afterwards: "That was worth my time to read it." But it wouldn't be worth it to the writers, because they know that their content isn't going to get magically sorted into its deserved place in the hierarchy.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of mob mentality and snowballing in Internet writing, but I think there are some external factors that are left out of his analysis. I think that the large chunk of people who 'can't be bothered' to contribute don't contribute because they have a personally successful life. I know it's gross stereotyping, but it seems as though the bulk of people who spend their time spouting ideals (Communists, OSS giants, pop stars, Obama) have done little to none of what society considers real work. These people have far more free time than personally ambitious, hardworking people who pursue personal success instead of a career in changing the world. Thus, these people who have too much time on their hands distort the written contents of the net. (Please keep in mind that this is a draft of a 5-minute theory, so it's sure to have some holes.)
As far as remedies go, I think rating algorithms need to be much more sophisticated. For example, 5-star scales could calculate the rating based on the mean of the mode star and its two neighbors' frequencies.
For simplicity, let's assume one person clicked 1, two people clicked 2, three people clicked 3, etc. This method would discard stars 1-3 and calculate a display rating of 4.5, instead of a simple mean of 3.6. By totally discarding far-out ratings, we might be able to keep ratings from all gravitating to the middle. This is another 5-minute theory, and I'm not a math whiz, so I'm sure there's a better/simpler way to implement a deviation scheme like this, but it's a thought.
Hmm, for added fun, try taking ALL ratings in a database and adjusting them all on a curve! But that's liable to guzzle server resources...
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this is where the web opens up new worlds (Score:4, Insightful)
In the good old days, getting enough people to see or hear a piece of creative work was a logistical nightmare. Using the kind of "peer review" he's talking about would have been impossible, even though it's a really promising approach. But the web could make it easy. It's the same kind of quantum shift, with equally huge ramifications, as the way the printing press made ideas accessible to many more people than before.
Facilitating good ideas and making them visible pretty much defines a civilization. Finding a way to get good ideas known is about as non-trivial as it gets. Because even though developed countries have grown rather good at the facilitating part, we're still wasting 99% of our good people at the visibility end.
You may have noticed by now that good people are hard to find. It'd be like climbing out of the Middle Ages if we stopped wasting 99% of them.
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