Relying on the community...
Category: Internet
Published: 10/01/2008 05:50 p.m.
I recently read a post from Scoble on idiocy and the internet. He says to some degree that "the masses are asses". In this last week on TWiT, Calacanis said instead of blogging, he just sends out an email, and then self-moderates replies as comments. The reason for these two changes are mostly because the masses are stupid. A recent comic on XKCD suggests a virus that would read back comments to youtube posters before they were sent. This sounds a bit cynical and like I am generalizing, but I wholeheartedly agree with this line of thinking.
More good information is helpful. More bad or useless information... very unhelpful. In most instances in life we make decisions on incomplete info. Usually we draw out the important stuff from the overloads of information. Now, thanks to technology, we have lots of other information to add. In some cases it is good. Ebay just helped me to sell some things I don't use, and I was able to look up old records to find a reasonable pricepoint. That information was useful. Yahoo! Answers is a detriment to society. A good deal of this ignorance is partly to due people being ignorant. But another cause is anonymity.
The advantage to being anonymous is a freeing feeling. But the advantage to being transparent is much better. One of the reasons eBay works so well is because people are rated and as a result develop an eBay identity. This allows for more trust and more honesty. Anonymity means less trust, and less pressure to be honest. In some cases like youtube, it doesn't really matter what people say because it doesn't count for anything. On blogs it can matter more. Especially if there are readers. There are not many readers here, but even if I had 100 million hits a day, I wouldn't write any differently.
These ideas aren't complete yet, but I will give it some more thought and write some more.
UPDATE: Youtube, upon seeing the XKCD cartoon, added a feature that reads your comment back. It hasn't really helped much, but it is cool to see they have a sense of humor...