The Danger of Aggregate Displays in Social Software

u write,

“So there’s a distinction we can make between actual popularity (which has social influence) and artificial popularity (which also has social influence). The first is driven by actually being a fan of someone. The second is driven by bordering-on-unethical advertising.”

i dont think u can make such a simple distinction as there are elements of each in the other which interelate in a complex fashion to determine popularity. soros would call it a reflexive process…

This is really important stuff.

Are there any laws about this? Enforcement? Do music download sites state anywhere how they calculate “Top Songs.” Are there any laws that would require such disclosure?

Trust and ethics relate to user interface because people will behave differently when they are in safe versus dangerous environments.

Unethical players, once revealed, can have the effect of changing behavior broadly (e.g. people’s fears of opening email messages with file attachments) thus requiring designers to change user interfaces that may have otherwise been really great.

The conclusion I remember from that study was that social influence can account for huge differences even among indistinguishable competitors (e.g. Britney Spears and, say, Mandy Moore). The differences were at least partly random, making it impossible to predict who/what will become popular.

Of course, manipulation can still play a role. The great thing about luck is that it breaks both ways. For every Britney Spears there is (hopefully) some schlub that got a big push but didn’t get popular.

You should check out Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan for a good discussion of luck. The study by Watts et al. is a real-world version of the Monte Carlo runs the author talks about in FbR.

If anyone who gets big bucks promotion is succeeding through unethical manipulation, then you have to include whoever gets elected President in the US in that category. It costs something like 100 million to get that job.

We’re all most likely to reach for whatever ‘everyone’ is watching or listening to, for many reasons, but we all still have the option of deciding whether we personally like it or not. With popularity, it’s no different than wanting to be invited to party with the coolest kids in school, whoever they are. There are plenty of adults acting the same way. It’s a personal decision whether to continue that reactive behavior or not.

If you’re marketing any product, you’re going to tell us about how everyone loves it. Truth? Wishful thinking? Manipulation? Is it manipulative to present your business as successful, with lots of happy customers, to prospective clients?

Vera

Vera, I think there is a difference between generic forms of self-promotion and tools which purport to report on popularity based on real data.

Part of the power of a database driven Internet is the ability to track data dynamically presenting users with real-time information. If it turns out that most of the data coming from such tools has been highly manipulated by unethical practices — then significant usefulness/functionality has been robbed from the collective Internet community by people making unethical decisions.

I’m not talking about the spammer types who can be expected to make unethical decisions. To whatever degree law enforcement can hunt them down, all the better.

I’m talking about reputable businesses and publicly traded companies who may exploit a lack of laws or a lack of enforcement to justify unethical behavior.

We can’t let the spammer types of the world drive Internet culture.

Shai, thank you and I do understand the distinction.

I don’t see the data as having any particular value(s) in itself when disassociated from the collectors of it, from their intent in ammassing it and in presenting it. The data are now in our machines and in the ‘cloud’, but this does not invest any meaning that didn’t exist when it was mostly on paper.

The ethical issues inherent in our interaction with the offerings of web 2.0 developers are important. Believing this is why I read this post carefully and took time to comment. It concerns me a great deal that so many millions of people are out here playing with all the toys, scattering their personal information everywhere, and taking little or no notice of who is capturing that information or what exactly is being done with it now or will be done with it in the future. I also believe that the data itself and the cool things software allows us to do with it are sometimes an obstacle to our remembering that all of it doesn’t exist in a vacuum where there are no people and therefore no personal responsibility.

Did you see Britney perform at the VMA’s the other day? I’d say that she deserves every by it of popularity she gets? NOT.

Great post, Josh. This is stuff that needs to be discussed out in the open. We have an opportunity to break way out of the “top 40″ mentality and really use systems to promote “the best” of what’s out there by real people. Of course, there’ll be spamming and scamming, but if we can build systems that allow us to communicate with the people we already trust to filter UP the best, we’ll be in good shape.

That brings me to remember the Starbucks phenomenon in Asia. There was not a single advertisement that was made about Starbucks. Then all of a sudden (especially in Manila), Starbucks outlets started to mushroom. The reason of its popularity? All was word-of-mouth. No print advertising and not even a single tv commercial.