The Social Disease

Very interesting article, but I can't agree with the proposed solution - or even the premise that there needs to be a solution.

The web is a big place, much like the rest of human culture, and there's no clear evidence that it can't both be a dance hall for most and a library for others. Culture has had that problem for millenia, and we have developed numerous mechanisms for coping with it. There have been countless books written over the centuries, and even more lately, so how come I can consistently find sources of the best literature written by man? The same mechanism, curation and word of mouth in circles that care about quality, will apply in the future, as it did in the past.

Your retort to this might be, "but most people don't have access to this curated content supply, they're stuck with the manipulative garbage produced for the masses". But that's always been the case, and it's not specifically an internet problem. Different people have different value-needs. Not everyone wants to read Dickens. Some people really just want to read Mills&Boons. The same is true on the web.

"Quantity has its own Quality" has evolved in the modern age as "Famous has its own authority". I don't think this is particularly different from any other time in history, but with all the voices you can certainly hear a wider range of opinions from people who would not have had a pulpit for other areas in the past. For example, in the 1970s a sports reporter would be reporting on that subject and I would know nothing about their personal politics. Today, famous in one area gets your opinion heard in multiple areas (e.g. politics).

The best thing about this from a publisher point of view is that candy sells. It doesn't require a fact checker or any real investigation to just "report" on what personalities said. Cheaper content that can be thrown up quick and SEO'd to death to insure some profit. Many people on this board have this very problem with certain tech blogs.

Combine this with the "them over there" syndrome where too many people think that groups they don't belong to are simpletons and it is a group to blame instead of individual actions. So we get 140 character or less slurs against broad groups of people, or we get two pundits from different groups to yell nothingness on a channel and call it debate. Its cheaper, louder and gets eyeballs. Nothing new really, just faster these days.

The example that really bothered me the most was the whole health care debate. All the 24 hour news networks, yes all, put pundits on and let them scream. No need to even leave the studios. Even when the bill's text was available no network really went through it on air to explain what it meant. It was important, but not enough to read. Heck, some investigative journalism about how government run health care that exists actually works in the USA (e.g. the VA and IHS). Heck, I don't think I saw one newspaper that reprinted large parts of the bill with annotations to explain what it meant. Once again, nothing new just more voices.

I'm not sure there is a tech solution. It would require some way to find authority in an area and do basic fact checking. You can't just say NPR is good (they missed at verifying things this weekend) or Fox News is good (knowing when poles were actually closing in Florida in 2000 would have been a good fact to verify). I'm not even sure you could make money printing a report of only facts around a subject. I get the feeling a self tagging scheme might work (trust this guy for sports but ignore him for everything else). Twitter and Facebook really don't have tools for people to follow based on subject and ignore on others. A very hard and old problem.

The browser solution is a nice idea, but it'll never work. There's too much information out there to consume in a million lifetimes, so even with a fancy browser-side solution, how will you find anything? And if you do find something somehow that's amazing quality, then what? How will your coworker who could really use that one specific tiny drop in the ocean of content find it? Will you recommend it to them? Vote for it? As soon as you introduce any method of filtering content whatsoever, it will be reverse engineered and gamed so that the quality stuff will no longer be synonymous with the popular content. Don't believe me? Look at Reddit, and increasingly, HN. this problem is ultimately not solvable in a scalable way without strong AI.

The issue of "mass-man" affecting the society has been well described in Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses"

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/revolt.pdf

I feel dirty up voting this one.

How about this for an idea.

- The problem, search engines help you find things that are popular, not things that are good (in your opinion)

- The Solution, create a public profile and start listing things you like. You are placed on some complex graph based on the things you like. When searching, results are filtered by the popularity of a site, based on your proximity to other users and their likes.

The influence of popularity, or collective opinion, is something deeply evolved into us. That means it cannot be all bad, and is probably quite good, perhaps strongly so. It seems related to our tendency and capability to cooperate, and that is certainly very important and valuable. So seeking to eradicate or abandon it does not seem the right basic route.

Is not the real problem one of deception? It is not that we confer our opinions, but that some people, or organisations, are supplying bad information, and getting away with it. This looks more like the target to address . . .

His solution sounds more like a surrender: just give up on trying to organize data.

Multiculturalism has utterly failed. http://goo.gl/CvDz