Crowds vs. Herds | Hacker News Reader

Crowds vs. Herds

4 pointssamb8 comments

I read Dharmesh Shah's "Lamenting the Loss of Reddit" at onstartups.com, which furter fueled a notion that's been brewing for some time now.

When does the Wisdom of Crowds become Herd Mentality? And why? The easy answer is that with wider adoption it's inevitable. Early adopters are, I would propose, more interesting people, generally, than later waves of mass market users.

If you're a social media startup is it an unconscious goal to make your community boring? Are Paris Hilton threads a sign of success?

This is only a thought stub, put out quickly. I'm interested to know what others think about this.

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If you look at Surowiecki's requirement for a wise crowd (versus a herd), you'll see that he asserts the requirement of a few things (pulled straight from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds):

Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.

Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.

Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

I would think that for most sites the first three would be the greatest challenges. The worst part is probably that what's most popular is getting greater exposure, thus making it more popular . . .

Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Haven't you ever noticed on Reddit: foo makes a comment, and then foo's comment karma drops to 0. All of a sudden, it goes way down to -3. Then bar makes a positive reply and gets a large karma score, and all of a sudden foo's comment shoots back up to 10 karma or more.

Well, people really are influenced by the opinions of others. If someone's downvoting someone, the majority of people are going to agree that downvoting that someone is a good idea. If a group of people are beating up someone, more people join in and beat up that someone.

Did you hear about the Juneteenth mob that pulled someone out of their car and beat them? Someone thought that was a good idea, and all of a sudden hundreds of people thought that was a good idea.

A community is just a set of people and customs. Both aspects can evolve significantly in a short amount of time unless control is asserted in one way or another to prevent this possibility.

I don't think it is a sign of success or failure that communities have evolved, but just simply that they have evolved. I also don't think that every community wants to be boring eventually. In fact, many communities exert intense control so that this doesn't happen (barriers to entry for new members, moderation, etc.). It all depends on how it is set up, monitored, and controlled.

Finally, I also don't think that wide adoption necessitates being boring. Plenty of communities are heavily moderated/edited/whatever and still have a wide following. Extreme examples are newspapers, movies, and tv shows. Communities crop up around them, but most people have little control over what is published. This is interestingly slowly changing though with TV shows and newspapers. Comments on stories and online fan boards are starting to influence publishing, but it is still filtered in such a way that an attempt is made to keep it distinctly not boring.

i think boring may have been the wrong word. i'm carving at the fact that communities seem to outgrow early adopters. which makes them more mainstream.

I think to get wisdom out of really large crowds you need something like pagerank.

Would you please elaborate?

Among people there are directed and mostly acyclic graphs of deference to greater knowledge of various topics. E.g. my girlfriend would ask me about math questions, and I'd ask friends who'd been math majors, who in turn might ask specialists in some subfield. Weight people's votes on a topic by their position in the graph.

Well, one has to build the technology to maintain clusters of groups, not one big ball of people talking to each other at the same time. Sorry, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but social groups are a hot topic, so: Read http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html :) it's a good read, you'll enjoy it. It perfectly captures all the issues between early adopters vs later adopters vs huge crowds.

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