841 Digg users can be wrong

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 November 2006 at 14:12
Tags: Digg, Journalism

Steve Rubel points to an example of a failure of “the wisdom of crowds” systems that underpin many “web 2.0″ news recommendation filters.

Hundreds of users of the social news aggregation site Digg recently fell for a hoax claiming that Reuters had reported a recall of the new Sony Playstation 3 console.

The Digg users continued to recommend the article even after others had started leaving comment suggesting that it was inaccurate.

Rubel comments:

All of this points to a real problem in the social media world. The only yardsticks we use to measure the trustworthiness of a source are purely based on popularity - e.g. in-bound links, votes, etc. Now often popularity and quality are closely aligned. However, both of these incidents demonstrate that the current system isn’t working. We need more.

Indeed. Rubel suggests a third-party star-rating system like the one used on eBay to record sellers’ trustworthyness. Presumably would entail Digg users earning reputations from other users depending on their reliability for recommending useful and accurate stories.

Before the luddite contingent among the journalists here gets too smug, let’s not forget that those vaunted “traditional” fact-checking mechanisms are not exactly flawless, either.

Tags: Digg, Journalism