Popularity as a metric of value
Submitted by Jamie Zigelbaum on October 29, 2008 - 9:38pm.
Recently some of the students involved in the center have been meeting and watching youtube videos, sharing websites, and talking about media. One of the more interesting topics to arise from these meetings has been about the reliance on popularity, or ratings systems, for judging what is good online.
You go to Digg and see the most Dugg stories by default, youTube has a most viewed feature, a highest rated list, etc. and so do many other social media sites. While many of us agreed that we find most of the stuff we view online through systems other than popularity metrics we were concerned about this massivley homogenizing machine and its effect on culture. I recall reading that a vast majority of news readers online primarily used the MSM and rarely ventured into the large swarm of other news sources online.
I wonder if anyone else has thought about this, and thought about ways to rely on better metrics, what they are (social nets, agents, whatever), or if there are other perspectives on popularity.
personally, i think it's
personally, i think it's always been a popularity contest. though perhaps at one time it wasn't views but money. or perhaps it still is money, i don't know. but the popularity question seems to call into question reputation systems as its developed on the web. i'll forward some relevant article when i can.
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