Back in Sep 2006, the social news site Digg was coming under massive scrutiny because of claims of gaming the system by a group of 30 or so Top Diggers. In my post Digg’s Design Dilemma I argued that the members of Digg were not to blame…the design of the site was.

Now when I say “blame” I don’t mean they deserved punishment. I mean that the design was enabling the behavior, in some cases it was even promoting it. The diggers were simply doing what their environment allowed them to do.

Since then, Digg has made some subtle interface tweaks that help to curtail gaming activity. These changes were made over time. (I’m only just now writing them up) They highlight some of the challenges of having a growing user base with active participants.

Removal of the Top Diggers List

The Top Diggers list showed who was able to get the most stories on the front page of Digg.

The first big change was when they finally dropped the Top Diggers list (Feb 2, 2006). Kevin Rose explains why:

“Which leads me (Kevin Rose) to a disappointing trend that we’ve noticed over the past several months. Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg. These users have been listed on the “Top Diggers” area of the site that was created in the early days of Digg when there was a strong focus on encouraging people to submit content. The list served a great purpose of recognizing those who were working hard to make Digg a great site, as well as a way for new users to discover new content. Now, as the site has matured and we regularly get 5,000+ content submissions per day, we believe there are better ways to discover new friends based on your interests and what you’re digging. So if you have been digging stories about digital cameras and Oolong tea, you will be introduced to other top users with those interests.

So what does this all mean? After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we’ve decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow.”

Dropping the Top Diggers list no doubt reduced the incentive for gaming on the site, as members lost any public recognition they formerly enjoyed. Never fear, though. Chris Finke, a developer, created a new Top Diggers page with the same functionality.

Finke wrote about the Top Diggers list removal:

“It’s an exercise in futility. A competent programmer could easily throw together a page scraper to determine the top submitters, so when the dust settles, Digg will still have problems with pay-for-play, but the most prolific users will no longer be recognized by Digg for their work that makes the site so successful.”

Finke’s right in that preventing a Top Digger’s list is an exercise in futility. But that’s not the real issue, as he suggests. The real issue is how much attention is being paid to the list. If the list is on Digg.com, then a tremendous amount of attention is paid to it and diggers enjoy the publicity (and rewards) from it. If the list is on another domain it’s just not that important. Perhaps a small number of people pay attention to it, and perhaps it could become important, but the community as a whole doesn’t seem to be paying attention to it.

This brings up a larger point…you can never completely prevent gaming. On that note, Clay Shirky used to say that social software is stuff that gets spammed.

What you can do, and what Digg is doing, is make clear what behavior you want and simply try to enforce that behavior with social norms and algorithmic detection. By taking down the Top Diggers list, Digg is effectively saying “we don’t support that behavior”.

Changes to Friends Page

The second big change is how Digg has evolved the Friends screen within the profile pages of the site (big release on Sep 19, 2007). Back when Digg was hearing lots of criticism, the friends page allowed immediate digging of friends’ stories. Here’s a screenshot (I apologize for the fuzziness)

Image copied from this RWW writeup on the Digg 3.0 redesign

The new design has taken this ability away. You can no longer digg your friends’ posts without going to each one in turn.

This is another design choice that lessens the ability to game the system. By simply changing the ease-of-access to information, Digg makes gaming not less possible, but less easy.

I’m not sure if it’s written in stone anywhere, but the old maxim rings true: The easier it is to do, the more it will be done. So when digging was super easy, it was done a lot, especially by people trying to game the system. Now that it takes more effort, gaming will be decreased.

But let’s step back a bit and ask: What’s going on here at a higher level? Well, I think we’re seeing evidence of a new sort of problem that seems unique to social design.

Small interface changes have huge system effects.

The small change of taking away the ability to digg on your friends page undoubtedly has a big effect on the ability to game the system. My guess is that it would take about an order of magnitude longer given the sheer simplicity of the Digg ajax widget.

An aside: as I was thinking about this bigger picture I stumbled onto this slide deck from Gene Smith, who seemed to be talking about Digg in terms of positive and negative feedback. In other words, each action on the site is either amplifying the effect (positive feedback) or dampening it (negative feedback).

It turns out that this is a great way to explain what’s going on in Digg. Gene’s definitely on to something here. (and, I might add, a great way to explain most ratings and review systems…the difference with Digg is that time is much more important…in most ratings systems time doesn’t dampen the rating like in digg!)

So, after reading up a bit on positive and negative feedback, equilibrium, amplification, and dampening…

What happened was that the old friends interface was designed in such a way as to amplify the # of diggs. Only, it amplified them too fast. If people were so inclined, they can put the system out of equilibrium by digging all their friends stuff. Now what does getting out of equilibrium mean in this case?

That other people got upset. Yes, that’s the technical way of describing out of equilibrium on a social site.

What’s happening in the new design is that Digg is dampening the friend effect. They’re watching the system, hearing that there is a problem (note there are several kinds of feedback), and saying…how can we dampen that effect in the design? To do that required only the smallest of changes, but nonetheless the outcome is potentially huge. I don’t know if Digg sees this as a win, but they’ve had to have seen some improvement.

(btw: Digg’s Daniel Burka on interpreting user feedback)

Note that this dampening would also result in a fewer number of diggs. I’m assuming, however, that the fewer diggs is trivial compared to their immense traffic. Digg has millions of users, and only a very small proportion of them were/are gaming.

This is the basic model of social software. Get input (signal) from individual users, create aggregate displays for everyone to see, and let users provide feedback. Over time, watch the health of the system and provide amplification or dampening when necessary to keep it stable (in equilibrium).

On Digg, when feedback is positive (people digging stories) the signal is amplified. When that feedback is negative (people burying stories), the signal is dampened. Time is a dampener, too. Digg has built into the system a dampener which removes stories after a certain period of time. If they didn’t, the stories with the largest number of diggs would stay on the home page forever.

In this case, Digg decided, after assessing the health of the system was out of whack, to dampen it by taking away the ability to provide positive feedback (diggs) on the friends page. There are still many ways to amplify the signal…

My guess is that as more social systems see this kind of activity, and the ease with which the system can be gamed with super fast input widgets like digg has, we will see a lot more dampening like this to happen.

It’s the only way to keep the system in equilibrium.

Client: “Performance metrics, market landscape, product strategy? You don’t sound much like a designer. Shouldn’t we be discussing color options and page templates?”

Designer: “Design is the physical, or in this case digital, manifestation of your product strategy. Of course we could define your customers’ experience with ‘paint by number’. But I think you’d agree we should figure out what you want to say to your customers and why before we dive into how we’re going to say it.”

There are two ways to view Design here.

If you view it as creating interfaces to content, then you might stop short of talking about strategy. Instead, you would focus on how to display what you’ve got. Typography, grids, information hierarchy, big buttons, huge fonts, navigation bars, etc.

The other view that Luke alludes to is one that I believe we are moving toward, necessarily: having the designers in the strategy discussion alongside the “business strategy” people talking about the “what” as well as the “how”. (btw: this is the “strategy” part of the Bokardo Design: Interface design & strategy for social web applications). I would be doing both myself and my clients a disservice if I ignored how their business strategy can drive the design. A designer has done their job well when they have created an honest implementation of that business strategy.

Design is business

Let’s be plain about it: Design is business. We can’t go on with suspicious…accountability. Designers, who excel at making hard things easy to understand through an interface, need to be part of the business discussion. Giving them Word docs and telling them to “make it look good” won’t cut it anymore. There is no accountability there, and worse, at that point much of the potential for really giving users what they need is already lost. If the Word doc is garbage, then no matter what the designer does will fail. Garbage in, garbage out. The scope of possibility is cut down to a narrow fraction of what it could be…of what the designer could come up with if they only had some time to think about how the strategy affects the design. As Peter Merholz says: Experience is the product.

So how does strategy affect design?

Look at Amazon.com. Their strategy is to help people find the best products. If they are successful at doing that then they’ll sell more. They’ve had a million insights along the way, but one of their best ones was that creating tools like wish lists actually helped realize their strategy because it allowed people to remember what they wanted and in doing so caused them to return more often. Allowing users to add comments and ratings let them sift through crucial, unbiased 3rd party information that helps them make better decisions about what’s good or not. And looking at their site from a wider view we see that Amazon has a ton of social features just like these that work to varying degrees. What was a hard problem 10 years ago was made much easier by the amazing work of the Amazon team and their innovation.

I don’t think its the case that strategy isn’t affecting design. It is, it’s just not clear how. Most of the time there is not a direct conversion between the strategy and the interface. The two sides rarely even talk, actually. The strategists are off using terms like “conversion”, “user-generated content”, and “ROI” while the designers are opining about “grid-based design”, “cross-browser rendering”, or “web standards”. These conversations are great within their own culture, but we need to find the middle ground as well, where strategy and design use the same vernacular.

I wholeheartedly agree that design is the manifestation of strategy. In software, it’s the realization of the conversation channels that a company/organization can have with its users/customers. The richness, depth, and value of that conversation is a direct result of the design. Yes, the value of the conversation is a direct result of the design.

To give you an example of where design might adversely affect the conversation, consider the case of Digg.com. As I outlined in Digg’s Design Dilemma, much of the superficiality of the conversations on Digg result from some very critical design decisions they’ve made. This isn’t an accident! It’s a direct result of the design. (Interestingly, in February Digg removed their Top Diggers list)…serving as validation that Digg is aware of the impact these design decisions make.

Another example: every time you hear about Twitter and the job they’re doing there, people say how “simple” the service is. Simple is a great word for your users to use when praising your stuff, as it means that the communication is clear.

Finally, if designers are going to be successful, then our contribution must be measured. If we are to be accountable (and I think we should want to be), then we need responsibility. Handing off…not necessarily creating…but clearly articulating and then handing off your strategy to a designer is how you give them responsibility, not whatever responsibility comes from making something “look good”.

Designers need a place at the strategy table because their work depends on and is a direct result of it. If it’s not already, realizing the business strategy of the organization in an interface should be the designer’s primary job description.

“The way I view it, Techmeme is gamed continuously because the real world is gamed continuously: Gamed in the sense that bloggers have always traded links and various other gestures of attention, sometimes through unspoken agreements, sometimes not. This was going on before my sites arrived, though these kinds of things can affect Techmeme. It’s hard to say how much.”

(my emphasis added)

The interview question that led to Gabe’s response was probably aimed at more insidious gaming, but Gabe realizes that it’s all one spectrum. The real world is all about gaming: the online equivalent only makes it easier to see. This applies to so many things…a major feature of the Web is the recording of human behavior in its many forms. To a lesser extent is the creation of truly new behaviors.

Over time, we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how people interact socially with one another because we can record things on the Web. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had lately with designers that ended up like “well, we’re doing design, too, but we’re really doing a ton of psychology”. The amount of effort and design energy being focused on the social interactions of people around a service is growing. Part of this results from the realization that we’re all not building the next MySpace. Most of us are working on something much smaller in scope, but still all about connecting people. Take an existing, successful service (or a startup), and figure out what social interactions will help that service grow and be successful.

Back to Techmeme. There is only a scale difference between those people who quickly post about a top story to get included in Techmeme and those who seed it in some other reverse-engineering way. I’ve known folks who reverse-engineer it fully, who figure out what you have to do at what time to get a story posted, even down to manipulating the way that Techmeme clusters posts, but it was mostly harmless geek fun. The advantage to Techmeme is that, so far, it has really felt unbiased in the way that content has been chosen. The stories that should be big are big on Techmeme.

Read the rest of the interview with Gabe at Wired.

That said, I do think that gaming Techmeme and gaming Digg are two different animals. As I’ve written before, the gaming on Digg has a lot to do with the design of the interface…practically asks for gaming, really. Techmeme’s interface certainly shows priority and changes over time, but it feels more opaque than Digg.

If you aren’t familiar with the details, here is a quick recap. ReadWriteWeb also had a nice timeline of events.

There are two ways you can look at this incident whereby Diggers overwhelmed the site by repeatedly (up to two per second) digging stories containing an HD-DVD crack code.

One is as described by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch: Digg Surrenders to Mob. Simply using the word “Mob” makes for great press. We gravitate to mobs because we know they’re messing with the Man. They’re anti-authority, they’re doing what they’re not supposed to, they’re pissed and fighting for their rights. We think of the French or Russian or American Revolution, and we like it.

But maybe, just maybe, mobs aren’t that bad. Terry Heaton had an insightful observation: “What I find most fascinating here is the automatic assumption that chaos is evil. This is a purely modernist perspective, but life itself proves it to be false.” He argues that the so-called Mob was more like the site at its finest…that a Mob is nothing more than democracy at high speed. I tend to agree with this.

The other way to look at the situation is as I described it: Digg Surrenders to Community. The difference is in those two words: Mob and Community. Now, I wasn’t being as calculated as Mike was being, I’m sure, but when realizing the stark contrast afterward it occurred to me that you either acknowledge the voice of the people on Digg as a group, or you do not. You either view them as a passionate Community, or you view them as a anarchic Mob.

In the subsequent days we have learned more about what happened. Digg CEO Jay Adelson was interviewed by Jason Calacanis (well worth the listen) and explained the incident from their view. He says: “”what we saw on Tuesday night was how far you can go…what the limitations of a democratic site can be and in this case it was pretty clear that no technology I could come up with and no amount of people I could hire could solve the problem”.

This story is amazing on several levels. It can teach us a lot about designing for community in an age when that community is completely dispersed around the Web.

A Community Protecting Itself

The digg community practiced what only relatively mature groups can: they acted to protect the group. The group they acted to protect was the one whose members have votes that are not censored, but counted. Clay Shirky, in his classic piece “A Group is its own worst enemy”, explains the phenomenon:

“here’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.”

The group effects in this case, of course, was overwhelming the site with diggs. This hadn’t happened before and was remarkable because all of the members were acting together…separately.

Setting Legal Precedent

Despite its incredible growth and fame, Digg is a very young company in an undefined space. We do not yet know how user submitted content will fare in the legal system, as there are few precedents to work from. The biggest question in the Digg case is this: Is Digg responsible for the content submitted by its users? Can Digg be held legally responsible for the crack code on their servers?

The easiest way for Digg to escape their situation would have been to kill it, shutting down the site until the wave of protest died down. Adelson explains their thinking…(we) “would remove it to protect ourselves, taking the safe way out”. Undoubtedly, this is what the vast majority of site owners will first think or be recommended by their legal team. They don’t want any trouble if they can help it.

But on second thought Digg realized that their adherence to the cease-and-desist was lame given the nature of their site. They run a so-called “democratic” site whose content is dictated by the will of the people. If the people want a certain crack code on the home page, who is the site to change that? In their case censorship is as bad as, if not worse than, blindly following a cease-and-desist, especially one concerning DRM.

But if there is legal action in this case, it will set an early precedent for all future decisions concerning user-generated content.

Overcoming Software Limitations

99% of the time we accept the limitations imposed on us by the software we use. We accept that we can only have so many programs running, that we can only share iTunes songs on 5 machines, that we can’t talk between IM services easily. For the most part, we’re just glad to be able to do what is offered because it is better than what we had before. In other words, the design of a web site usually dictates the behavior that happens there.

But there is a small population of people, entrepreneurs and hackers, who routinely fight these limitations. These people are incredibly important because despite their small numbers they lead a much larger community to water.

In the case of Digg, however, the community as a larger whole challenged their limitations. That’s what revolutions are all about…they are magnificent because they don’t happen all the time and they usually happen for a very good reason. In this case the Digg community needed to remind Kevin Rose and Co. that they were the valuable editor, not whomever was taking down the code posts.

For the first time, Digg users fought through the technical and editorial restrictions to take full control of the site, if only for a short time, overriding the site owner’s ability to do anything other than shut down the service or let it go on unchecked. There was no way to slow down or stop the submissions without shutting down the site…there were just too many of them. For a short time on May 1, 2007, Digg users fought for and won the Digg.com domain.

What are the Design Implications?

One thing became very clear in the Digg incident: very few people who posted the HD-DVD code knows how to use it to crack a DVD. And that’s an important point because this wasn’t about the necessity of posting a particular code…this was about the community’s insistence that they not be told what they could or could not post. Once you give democratic power, once the community has had a taste of voting, they will not give it back. If you live by the digg, you die by the digg.

Now, there are two things we can potentially learn from this event. One is that you need tighter controls over the content people submit to a site, increasing the limitations imposed by software. We could design our social software with throttling, for example, so that in times of crisis we can slow down submissions in order to filter them easier. This would make it easy for developers to write tools that allow editors to simply remove any submission with a certain string, for example, and it would have time to work.

The other thing we could learn is that this behavior was appropriate and desirable in a healthy community. Imagine if, despite the attempts of thousands of people to submit the hacker code, Digg was able to squash the revolution, so to speak. What would have happened? Well, most of those folks would then have felt like their voice wasn’t being heard, that Digg was in complete control, and that their so-called democratic site wasn’t very democratic at all.

First, read Digg’s Jay Adelson explaining that some stories containing an HD-DVD crack code were taken down on Digg because of a cease-and-desist letter:

What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?

Then, what happened next was crazy. The Digg community kept posting and digging stories about it, and Digg finally gave up and stopped trying to moderate the diggs.

Then, Digg founder Kevin Rose throws in the towel:

“today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

This is utterly nuts. This is the Digg community taking control of the site!

Aggregate displays are everywhere, from the book ratings at Amazon.com to the most-emailed articles at the New York Times to the number of diggs at Digg.com. They’re a primary element of social design. They not only let people know how their actions relate to others, but they also alter the behavior of those who view them.

Columbia sociology professor Duncan Watts has written the fascinating piece Is Justin Timberlake the product of Cumulative Advantage?, describing a sociology experiment that has huge implications for the display of aggregate data on social web sites. (thankfully, the article isn’t about Justin Timberlake at all. The author doesn’t even mention his name…probably titled by an editor at the Times)

Description of the Experiment

Watt’s study demonstrates how socially influenced we are as we use software and make decisions online. He describes an experiment in which they built two web sites. In one web site they showed a list of songs to users and had the users rate the songs as they listened to them, allowing the users to download the songs if they wanted to. In the other, they also allowed the users to rate and download the songs but they also showed the download numbers to the users. In the second group the users could see how often the songs had been downloaded as they used the site. The difference was in the display: users either saw the aggregate display of downloads (called the social influence group) or they did not (called the independent group).

In addition, they split up the social influence group into 8 parts. They replicated the same test 8 times to see if there were any differences over time.

Watts describes how the download numbers could be used to test:

“This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.”

In other words, the mere fact that users can see the downloads is being tested. A simple display difference. A design decision.

Does Seeing Aggregate Data Change Behavior?

Does displaying aggregate download data change the behavior of users? The answer is Yes. Their findings:

1. The most popular songs in the social influence group were way more popular than those in the independent group. In other words, the rich got richer when people could see the aggregate data.
2. The popular songs in the 8 social influence groups were not the same! That is, the download numbers affected the popularity of the songs. Early download leaders continued to lead not just because they were good songs, but because they were already leading.
3. The independent group was considered the test for quality. The songs that were most downloaded were considered the highest quality because everybody voted independently…there was no social influence since download numbers were not displayed. These songs did correlate slightly with the songs in the social influence group that did well, but did not have much of an effect overall.
4. The social influence group was influenced much more by the number of downloads than by the quality of the songs. The social influence had a stronger effect on the song downloads than independent, unbiased decision making.

This result could be seen as a confirmation of the bandwagon effect, a known bias resulting from our tendency to follow the crowd. This bias is probably the result of ignorance…if we don’t know something we tend to rely on the opinion of others. In this case users probably paid attention to the download numbers because they didn’t have any prior experience with the music.

Outcome is Unpredictable

One outcome is that predicting what will happen in social influenced situations is impossible. Watts explains:

“In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market.”

In other words, early leaders tend to stay in the lead simply because people see they are leading and are influenced by it. If a song gets an early lead then people assume it is because of quality, but the case may simply be that it happened to be one of the first listened to.

Huge Implications for Social Site Design

This result has huge implications for all social web sites, especially those that show aggregate data. Digg, for example, shows aggregate data everywhere on the site. This experiment, in addition to several other issues that I wrote about in Digg’s Design Dilemma, suggest that the results there are socially influenced to such an extent that it would be hard indeed to know where the quality lies…

It also leads to interesting questions for those building social sites. What data do we aggregate? What should we display? Where? What influence will it have on the future behavior of those who see it? Does it influence the quality of content? How so?….etc…etc…

Another level of complexity can be added on top of this. What if the users knew more about the download numbers? For example, what if a user knew their best friend hated one of these songs? Of course that’s going to affect our decision as well, and maybe moreso, because the user trusts their friends more than a simple download number.

A Note of Caution

Finally, a note of caution. Over at Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp extrapolates this finding further, suggesting (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it explains other phenomena like Web 2.0 and the blogging A-List. He wonders if the A-List is just riding a wave of initial popularity.

We should be careful to push this that far, however, because some things that Karp mentions happen over a lot longer a period of time and have many other factors involved. The A-Listers, for example, drop like a rock if they don’t continue to post and get linked to. They quickly lose their advantage in the face of low post output and other changes over time. In the study Watts tested the ratings for song preferences. Songs, of course, don’t change over time. My guess is that the result will apply relatively well to things that don’t change…songs, movies, texts…and less to things that don’t.

If Watt’s experiment is solid, however, it should help inform anybody building a social web site. If people are unduly influenced by aggregate data, then we cannot make any assumptions about the quality of it. In other words, much of the success in social systems is based on that most horrible of reasons…luck.

‘”All markets work at three levels”, he said. “Transactions, conversations and relationships”. Eric is an atheist. Sayo is a Christian. With those two triangulating so similarly on the same subject, I began to figure there was something more to this relationship business.’

Doc starts this excellent piece by wondering what we can learn about economy from open-source practices. A lot, it seems. When we look at something like the incredible creation of Linux, what does that tell us about what we value and why and how we get stuff done?

Well, for one thing it’s not always about the money, which, if you live in the U.S., you would be hard-pressed to believe. So much is about the money here that imagining great software being built by volunteers is mind boggling in itself.

This insight leads Doc to a wide-ranging discussion evolving around the idea that we’re just beginning to model interpersonal relationships online. That, when we stand back from our transaction-oriented mindset we realize that there is another level to economies that happens on the relationship level. We treat people differently based on our relationship with them, and it directly effects the economy when we make trades based on those relationships.

From a social design perspective this is right on. We’re continuing to model our social lives online, and while at the present moment all systems are transaction-based maybe they’ll be more nuanced going forward?

So, in the future when I want to trade something online I can set different transaction preferences depending on the strength of my relationship with someone. The relationship affects the transaction. If I’m trading with a stranger, they pay full price. If I’m trading with a Bokardoan, I trade half-price. And so on. This, as Doc points out, is how economies run on a personal level, in 3rd world countries, before they go global on the Web.

As Doc says, we need a solid identity framework for this to work, and given that just yesterday another giant (Digg) said they would support OpenID, that might be the framework that gets us there.

For Doc’s brilliant wide-ranging take on this, please read: Building an Relationship Economy

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model?.”

Why is this an important question?

This is an important question because of the widely-held assumption that taxonomies are the right answer for most of our information organization problems.

The thing is, I’m not happy with any taxonomy, really. I can’t think of a single one that works well for me, let alone works perfectly. Even a site with as simple a taxonomy as Apple.com confuses me, with some links on the 2nd level nav (like software and hardware) that are clearly a wider scope than those on the top level. I have to remember that this is the case when I want to find the software page…I have to remember the taxonomy, which to me is a mark of a poor one.

Even the taxonomies I build for myself don’t work all the time, though they work much better than those that others build that I have to use.

A reasonable response might be that taxonomies are the best tool we’ve got. Most of that argument rests on these facts:

1. Taxonomies have been around for a long, long time and are the core of several disciplines including library science and are thus trusted by many practitioners as the Right Way to Do Things.
2. Taxonomies are easily implemented without the input of users. This is a bad idea, of course, but that’s a big reason why there are so many of them.
3. Folksonomies are new and therefore scary. Even the best example of them, Del.icio.us, has only been around for a couple years and only been working at a huge scale for about a year.
4. Folksonomies suffer from the Cold Start Problem (CSP). You have to build up tagging datasets over time, so at the beginning there is really no navigation to build on top of them.

Now, I don’t think that it has to be either/or. We don’t have to build either a taxonomy or a folksonomy, necessarily. They might co-exist in some way, as Thomas Vander Wal has argued.

But the question still stands…are there any examples of knock-down, drag-out taxonomies that scale in today’s world and generally work well for those who use them?

UPDATE Donna Maurer at Digital Web has taken me to task for blurring the question, saying I’m asking for a scalable taxonomy while really wanting one that works. She’s absolutely right…I’m assuming that while it scales the taxonomy still has to be useful. Can’t we have both?

“The New York Times unveiled a new service today that allows readers to quickly post stories that they find on the newspaper’s Web site to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine.

It marks the first time that the country’s third-largest newspaper has added a news-sharing tool to its Web site, allowing readers to develop conversations and post comments about specific stories. Readers will be able to add headlines and a small portion of text to the social media sites by clicking on the logos of Digg, Facebook and Newsvine. Those logos began appearing next to The Times’ stories this morning in the same box as the print and e-mail tools, although they’re initially hidden until users click the “Share” link.”

Social Design in the raw. WOW.

Remember when the NYTimes moved to RSS and Dave Winer later characterized it as a tipping point?

Well, this may or may not be a tipping point, but it sure is a big deal…is shows the significance that Digg and others are having on the spread of news.

And the people powering it? You and me. Yes, that’s right. The Users. HA!

Cnet’s Elinor Mills, in a piece describing Digg rigging on a wide scale, writes:

“dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social-media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, at this point. (see Brian Clarke’s writeup) Digg’s gaming issues have been widely known for many months now. In Digg’s Design Dilemma, I pointed out that the design of the site had a lot to do with the gaming going on there. But, I should add, it also had a lot to do with the growth of the site…so there’s no clear answer about what to do.

It’s becoming clear that any successful site sees its share of gaming. Even Del.icio.us, who refused to comment on the Mills story, has seen gaming. And this is the way that media has worked for a long time. Who controls the media controls the story. That’s why we’re seeing so much SPAM/gaming…we should expect it in any successful social site.

Real money changing hands

It’s getting to the point where real money is changing hands to game Digg. Mills writes:

“Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.”

I think the observation is interesting, the inference shaky. There are people who think that all they need to do is to game Digg for their advertising? Is there any example of a company who survives on Digg gaming alone? I doubt it.

(Update…Neil Patel, quoted in the story, blogs about how Mills has inaccurate info)

In addition, Mills quotes Barry Parr, who makes a controversial comment, to say the least:

“Digg and others are working hard to deal with this kind of abuse,” Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr wrote on his blog this week. “But until it is eliminated, the credibility of social-news sites will be in question.”

Credibility in Question?

Hmmm…let’s compare this to another abusive environment where we might have questions about credibility. I wonder if the lobbying in Washington is hurting the credibility of the U.S. government. Until lobbying by Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Insurance goes away, the credibility of our government will be in question. Ha! It may be true, but that doesn’t mean it will be going away any time soon, or that over time it lessens…at this point most people simply accept evil interests as part of the deal. I think maybe we should accept that SPAM will be an ongoing problem for social sites…after all, they’re social sites.

So, let’s agree right now. The credibility of social news sites will always be in question, OK? And, for that matter, so it should be for non-social news sites!

Nobody said that putting the “social” in play on web sites would mean an end to corrupt behavior. In fact, the opposite may be true. As we model real-life behavior better and better online, as we open up communication channels and people increasingly live their social lives online, we’re going to model every part of those lives…the good and the bad.

What to do about it?

But what can we do about it? I think the answer comes from the community of the site. At some point you cannot rely on algorithms to do your SPAM harvesting for you, you have to rely on the wisdom of real people, because SPAMmers are really smart. Hopefully, crowds are smarter.

To this end both Digg and Reddit claim to have strong communities that self-police. They help drive out SPAM when they recognize it as such, burying stories that don’t seem right. Digg CEO Jay Adelson says:

“There is technical information that only we could know that flags us when someone is attempting to manipulate (stories and rankings)…By merging the algorithms and the people I believe we have a foolproof system.”

“Foolproof”?…I wonder what he means by that…

Edgework – Joshua Porter 59MB MP3

“>More details on Brian’s site. Also, check out Brian’s Edgework podcast feed, loaded with some excellent interviews about designing on the Edge…what’s next in the world of design.

I chronicled Digg’s Design Dilemma back in September. At that point, after yet another claim of gaming had been made against them, Digg decided to alter its promotion algorithm to minimize the effect of the most popular Diggers…so that they didn’t have undue control over what was promoted to the home page. Digg had effectively changed the rules of its game.

Now, top Diggers are pushing back. Muhammad Saleem & Mark Johnson, two of Digg’s top users, wrote an open letter to the company complaining about the change. Here is their main argument:

“By creating an algorithm that punishes top users, and rewards new users you are creating several problems for Digg.

1. You are discouraging the active or successful users from contributing, since it becomes progressively harder for their stories to reach the front-page. If the more front-page stories you get, the harder it is to get more on the front-page, how do you expect to motivate people to keep on contributing?
2. You are preventing the most breaking and cutting edge news, contributed by the top users, from reaching the front-page in a timely manner. This creates two possible problems, either Digg will lose its competitive advantage for having all the breaking news first (since people will have already read the news elsewhere, while the top contributor’s story sits in the queue), or a new user will post a duplicate story, that because of the algorithm will make it to the front-page faster. Thus encouraging new users to submit duplicates.
3. You are creating a disincentive for people to hunt for cool stories. By allowing certain users to reach the front-page more easily, you create incentives for them to look for mediocre stories, because they know that odds are that the story will get to the front-page anyway.

I hope you see how this change will alienate any user who devotes more than just a few minutes a day contributing, and eventually lead to a major decline in the timeliness and quality of the content on Digg.”

Here Muhammed and Mark make some very interesting points. They want to use Digg, but don’t feel like it is worth their time anymore. Notice the words they use: motivation, contributing, encouraging, disincentive…this is social design in its most raw form. And somewhat ironic because the users are the ones who are telling the designers how to motivate them.

So what’s the problem with the design? Not usability, not visuals, not interaction ambiguity. The issues are social ones, probably unpredictable in any straightforward way. This is as clear an indication as any that design is a different animal now that people live their social lives online.

“People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn’t try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.

It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don’t just hit the back button once, they hit it twice.”

This is a fundamental truth to the Web. This is how the Web is made meaningful. This is how data, in databases or XML files or some mini-format, are made useful by people. This is also why Google works, because they realized that they could make a reputation engine that approximated value in the social linking activity on the Web.

Some folks want to create authoritative sources so that they don’t have to think about things…don’t have to consider the source and the context of life. Down with Wikipedia because it’s not authoritative! Down with Digg because it is gamed! Down with Google because of SPAM! Just give me the answer, dammit!

But if you walk down Main Street, USA, and listen in on conversations what you hear is more like Wikipedia or Digg or Google than it is the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Associated Press, or a Librarian. These tools are the people’s tools, because they are built on the relationships of millions of people, not the expertise of a few. Most people aren’t experts, and most people don’t need no stinkin’ experts.

There is something great in thinking that on the Web we are free to pursue our own reputation. If we write well, help others, continue learning, and link to valuable resources we can carve out a niche where there was none. Is this an egalitarian pipe-dream? I don’t know. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.

But whether it is or it isn’t, do as Tim suggests, and don’t make people click the Back Button twice.

“The secret to success with consumer-generated media is that the community has to feel wanted, important, engaged, and a little in love. For it to work, participants have to feel ownership. And you generally don’t feel ownership of something that pays you. When you get paid, you’re the one getting owned.

I think it’s different for JPG and Threadless because we’re not paying you for participation, we’re paying you for letting us make real products from your work. The difference is subtle, but important, because the participation is still rewarded by all those great humanistic rewards that are more important than money.

The bottom line is, when you found a relationship on getting paid, it never goes farther than that. And the moment the money runs out, it’s over. You knew what this was.”

Powazek is the creator of the very fine JPG magazine, a publication that rewards people who submit photos to the site by publishing the voted-on winners and sharing a little cash. This model is very much like the model used at Threadless, where instead of photos people submit t-shirt designs.

Derek suggests that the difference between the two models is subtle and crucial. Here’s how it breaks down:

JPG/Threadless Model

• People submit their own content(photos, t-shirts) to the site to be voted on
• Other members vote on the content over a short period of time
• The site creators choose the lucky winners (taking into account votes, but not entirely)
• The people whose content is used is given fabulous prizes

Netscape Model

• People submit public, freely-available content (URLs) to the site to be voted on
• Other members vote in real-time
• The most-voted-on content rises to the top of the site
• A few, select people (known as Navigators) who have shown a proficiency for submitting valuable content get paid just for submitting

The differences seem pretty clear. In the JPG/Threadless model people are submitting their own, personally-crafted content. It’s theirs, and therefore they have an emotional attachment to it. That seems to be what Derek is driving at…they care about the content. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, this is unique content, other people can’t submit it. In other words, nobody could do the same job, even if they were being paid more money.

Also, in the JPG/Threadless model everyone has an equal shot of getting paid, whereas in the Netscape model only those people who have been designated Navigators get paid. Other, talented folks who submit great content are shut out in the cold. This creates a two-class system which will eventually break because the have-nots will eventually want to be the haves.

One important issue that Derek didn’t mention is that despite the fact they’re submitting publicly-available content, Netscape Navigators do have unique skills: the skill of finding and filtering valuable content for others. This skill shouldn’t be downplayed as something anybody can do, because not everybody has that editorial knack that the best diggers and navigators have.

What can Netscape do?

However, the current Netscape, as Derek explains, could be improved upon. How could they do that?

I think the answer is simple. Netscape needs to have a one-party system where contributors get paid based on merit, and everybody has an equal shot at success, just like the JPG/Threadless model. If someone submits a story that turns out to be popular, they should get rewarded for that, even if the reward is little. If someone shows a proficiency for it, then they’ll get paid more. This would get Netscape’s model in line with the JPG/Threadless model.

This model is similar to what other news sites like Newsvine. There, however, you’re paid on the success of advertisements, not by a voting metric. But it is similar in that you’re paid for your own unique content, not on editorializing others’ content.

Another possibility, and one that Netscape might even be implementing, is to periodically change the Navigators based on their recent performance. The faster this change takes place, the closer it resembles the paid-as-you-go model described above.

Not so fast…

Changing something here changes something there…there are several other issues that come into play if Netscape were to make this change. This would increase the incentive for all users to game the system. As has been reported in Digg, folks would try and find ways to artificially increase the votes on the content they’ve submitted. This is a serious issue, and one that isn’t as big a deal on JPG/Threadless because the site owners make the final decision. That said, those sites aren’t pure voting sites…so some issue of editorial bias might come into play.

Opening up Netscape like this would also make it necessary to create a system of micropayments for the contributors. When a story gets popular, the submitter has done their job and can get paid. But how much is a single good submission worth? Probably not much, but it is a non-zero amount so that would have to be paid out. Even though this seems relatively extreme, isn’t this what the Long Tail is all about?

If Netscape could figure out how to keep SPAM low and implement this sort of micropayments system, they could harness the editorial skills of millions without creating a two-class system. If they could create a back-end that accurately tracked the success of contributors, then it could work. After all, somehow Google keeps their Adsense model working in the face of a ridiculous onslaught of spam. It might be possible to do the same at Netscape, and redefine the news as we know it.

It’s called Democradig.