A guinea pig lives, on average, for about five years. Unless social media sites such as YouTube and Digg can find a way to overcome endemic structural and philosophical issues, they may not even make it that long.
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Social media sites have a noble goal: Let viewers decide what content is viewed… rather than biased media outlets! They do this by enabling users to “vote” on all available content… and by making each piece of content more or less accessible depending on those votes.
Their thinking is backed by recent group intelligence research that shows that when people are given the opportunity to vote – and when their votes are independent and uninfluenced by those around them – they actually make better decisions than experts.
Though group intelligence works in theory, and in various experiments, it’s tough to implement on websites that depend on growth and repeat traffic in order to live another day.
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Voting isn’t the problem. Actually, voting – giving users control over content that wasn’t previously available – is what makes these sites so appealing. The problem is in keeping votes independent and uninfluenced by social hierarchies… so as to ensure that the best content gets viewed – rather than, for instance, content peddled by a dominant social group.
But though the stated goal of all social media sites is to put editorial control in the hands of users, the unstated (yet very understandable) goal of these sites is to grow and survive. And to do that they need to build a community.
Thus, all major social media sites enable members to gauge each other’s popularity, view each other’s comments, and view the relative popularity of specific content before voting.
Though such features do a great job of facilitating growth for social media sites, they also undermine the integrity of the sites’ mission: to provide the best content available!
If given the opportunity, friends will vote for each other’s content… regardless of how good it is. With enough friends, anyone can quickly and artificially elevate content that otherwise wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) see the light of day… thus eliminating the benefits of user-controlled content (e.g. better content!).
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It’s a huge problem when the stated objectives of companies and industries conflict with their practices… and that’s what is happening in social media. The stated objective of social media sites is to give users better content by extending to them an equal vote. But in practice, these companies are building large communities of entrenched, self-promoting users to sustain themselves, and are thus forcing tradeoffs along the way.
It is this kind of community building that may spell the end for some of today’s largest social media sites. As these sites continue to welcome and encourage increasingly entrenched social groups, their content will become increasingly dominated by those same social groups, and the value of their content will lessen.
Many interesting articles have been written about this phenomenon on Digg, the Internet’s largest social news site. Currently, the top 100 Digg users represent about .018% of the Digg user base yet are responsible for 56% of front page content. Think there’s a bias toward entrenched dominant social groups?
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When the editorial slant (in favor of established social groups) becomes particularly noticeable, as it is becoming on Digg, these sites lose the value they initially set out to offer: providing a better way to get great content in the hands of the users. And when that happens, the Death March begins!
Mass exoduses from social media sites (likely from one site to another) are inevitable. Once users sense that content is slanted in favor of a dominant social group, they will leave for another site where content is less slanted because, simply, dominant social groups haven’t yet been established.
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Though the social media industry is fairly new, online communities have had the lifespan of a Guinea Pig since the beginning. It started twenty years ago with CompuServe and UseNet groups, continued with AOL and Prodigy chat rooms, then with Tripod and Geocities forums, and most recently with Friendster.
Online communities thrive at first, but then grow too big… and their growth becomes coupled with the growth of dominant, self-promoting social groups… who dominate for a while until others decide to subvert, sabotage or circumvent the established order, at which point the original members leave, to be replaced by spammers (vultures), who spam what’s left of the community into oblivion.
This pattern suggests that social media – the marriage of media and community – is inherently unstable, and that today’s social media sites are simply temporary organizations that will eventually flicker out.
What’s the average life cycle of once-dominant online communities? You guessed it: about five years… exactly the average lifecycle of a Guinea pig!
The problem with social Media sites is that they do not properly implement the “wisdom of crowds” idea. For the wisdom of crowds to work all participants must be unaware of what others have said about an article and of how well voted the article is.
What we have is the “follow the leader” syndrome where once something gains traction is takes off as others jump on board.
It is already begining to show that the friends feature on Digg is very powerful in getting your submissions on the the home page. Even among top diggers the one with more friends will typicaly get their story to the home page first.
I like your opinion, it’s honest opinion…..
and I like your blog too,….
Actually, Social Media sites are the beginning of a paradigm shift. The problem is that most of them are unaware of it, as are most commentators.
Regardless of how you define human needs, people seek to meet them. Most of the internet doesn’t do much to meet those needs. But it can do a lot more. And many human needs involve connecting with others. But can the internet help us TRULY connect? Not just yet. But it’s getting closer, and social sites are the leading wave.