digg

It’s not usually that much a big deal for Digg, but now journalists have picked up on another phony article.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion reports that Digg users read the post (”Just out from Reuters: 650,000 PS3s to be recalled”!) and predictably ‘Dugg’ (voted for) the story. In the echo chamber that is Digg, this quickly led to more and more Diggs, the story landed on the front page, and eventually it was determined to be a fraud perpetrated by someone as a gag. (The story has been taken down.)

Steve believes this is grounds for some kind of trust/authority rating system by a third party, similar to what eBay has done. I disagree. eBay’s reputation system works well because the range of behaviors it monitors is small and easy to check - Did payment arrive? Was the product shipped?

On the contrary, collaborative-editing users are a lot harder to rate. Do you rate them based on accuracy? If so, most submitters are accurate, so it would probably only filter out those who make mistakes or those who are spammers and scammers. Fine, but that doesn’t rank the remaining valid submitters. Then you get the problem of perceived bias: would you rank someone highly who held positions that are wildly different from yours?

Muhammad Saleem of The Mu Life circles around this point. He asks, “Is bias in social media so strong that people will believe anything (as long as it is pro-Apple, or pro-Nintendo, anti-Microsoft, or anti-Sony, and so on…)?”

That’s part of the problem, but the big issue is speed. Everyone is so interested in being the first submitter, the first one out there with the news, or the first one to support (or Digg) an article that fact-checking and double-checking independent sources falls by the wayside.

Digg and the other sites are a lot like Wikipedia, and, for proto-Web 2.0 sites, gossip blogs: put something up, and correct it later. Wikipedia works by successive iterations that are supposed to pare down an article to its most accurate, objective words.

We like Digg because it’s fast and it brings us everything from the mainstream to the unusual. Part of the price of speed is accuracy. “Trust but verify,” President Reagan once said. I’d modify that to “Enjoy, but wait for confirmation, and don’t jump on the bandwagon right away.”

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