Thursday, May 03, 2007

Digging their own grave?

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has suggested the introduction of a layer of randomness to prevent small groups of pals gaming socially-generated news sites, but Cognitive Daily thinks that Tuesday's "organised mass social disobedience" on Digg indicates that such platforms might contain the seeds of their own destruction:

"It seems to me that methods such as this might destroy some of the "social" aspects of a social news-gathering service. If you can't get together with your friends and decide what's popular, then what's the point? Perhaps if Digg was run under the system Haselton suggests, it wouldn't be as popular as it is now. Perhaps the point of the system is to game the system, which means that these systems are inherently unsustainable. Either they'll get popular and die because of their popularity, or they'll never get popular and die because of that."

The comments are interesting.

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