Monday, October 29, 2007
Conclusions
Digg.com has grown to become an ultimate and immediate cog in the wheel of Internet activity. Its amalgamation of social networking, digital information sharing, information discovery and aggregation has allowed and encouraged it to emerge as a powerhouse of information and, by extension, potential knowledge. The site has integrated the qualities of the web that make it possible for epistemological goals to be met by users worldwide. Its speed enables users to gain access to information so that their time is saved for actual reading, study and formation of new ideas. Time is not wasted on unfulfilled searches to the same extent that it once was. Digg also has characteristics that make it extremely powerful: "the wisdom of crowds" and tools that can make the researcher aware of things he or she might not have known they were interested in otherwise are joined by various search options and browsing possibilities. These, and similar, tools also make Digg.com a key instrument of fecundity. Users are able to tailor the way that they gain and share knowledge so that a greater number of people are given access to a greater amount of information, on a larger variety of topics. Finally, Digg.com has the potential to be a very reliable source. Though all of the items it contains may not be completely reliable, Digg makes it easy to trace the history of the item. In the end it is up to the user to determine whether the information he or she gathered leads to satisfying and justified answers, results or truths.
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2 comments:
Thanks very much for your presentation. Here are a few comments and questions that I had.
Do you know if all the diggs (or buries) have equal weight? For example, do the votes of longtime participants who have done a good job in the past carry any more weight than the votes of a first time user?
Do the websites get one single rating based on the votes of all participants? Or can I see how the websites are rated by people like me in some sense? (I am thinking of the alerts that I get from Amazon.com saying that people who bought this book also tended to buy this other book.)
Do you know what the reason is that people have to log in order to digg websites? Is this a way to keep people from gaming the system?
Any information on the Internet can be accessed very quickly. But you do have to find it first and that can take awhile. So, in terms of speed, I imagine that the value of Digg is that it shortens this step. It aggregates stuff that is most likely to be of interest to its users. In a similar vein, Ross Atkinson suggests that libraries should make the best stuff the most accessible.
For the reasons that you give, it may be fairly easy to verify the accuracy of information accessed via Digg.com. Such greater verifiability will mean that Digg.com is more likely to lead to true beliefs than false beliefs. But we might also simply ask whether information accessed via Digg.com is more likely to be accurate than inaccurate (e.g., because of the wisdom of crowds). What do you think?
(It sounds like the Digg.com algorithm is analogous to the Google.com algorithm. In one case we are counting diggs and in the other case we are counting inlinks, but both algorithms are essentially counting “votes.” The problem is that we do not know exactly what people are voting for. A story or a website may get a lot of votes because it is accurate or just because it is interesting.)
Your point about Digg.com potentially being distracting is very interesting (no pun intended). According to Goldman, an information resource is powerful if it leads to a lot of true beliefs about questions of interest. But if an information resource is so interesting that it distracts you from finding answers to the questions that you started with, this certainly seems like a problem.
Don
In theory all votes are equal, but the placement of a story on the front page is determined by an algorithm that is kept secret so that people have a harder time "gaming" digg, or manipulating it so that certain stories go to the front without accountability. There is actually some controversy about the secrecy that can seem to surround Digg.com, especially in the past. Sometimes the number of votes a story gets is influenced by who the contributor is. There is a certain sense of authority or reliability connected to the top contributors, specifically, the top 100. Cohn tells us that "The top one hundred contributors--determined by their success in placing their submissions on the front page--are responsible for more than half the content that fills the front page each day. This group has been playing the part of a colective editor, and offers have poured in to pay popular Digg contributors for their services" (2007, 9). The point of using this here is that people who frequent Digg seem to trust the contributions of contributors they come to know, and because of that, stories submitted by these are more likely to make it to the front page. There is more weight for them in the minds of collective diggers than there actually is in the weight of a digg itself. You can only digg or bury one story one time--but some worry that gamers can get around this. It is something that the site is constantly combatting.
Submissions do only get one rating,but this can change because digging and burrying can continue and change the status of the submission. There are several ways to build up a community in Digg so that you can see the types of stories you are interested in. If someone notices something that you have submitted or dugg, (or vice versa) and they agree with your percieved position on topics, they can designate themselves a fan and you can either allow them into your circle of friends or not. It is also possible to see who dugg the story, who commented on it, etc. but I don't believe there is the same type of alert you would find on Amazon--though the site will show you "friends" activity (Jason or Jill, correct me if I am missing something here). It is a site that is constantly expanding the ways in which Diggers can access information, so I don't want to say anything ABSOLUTELY.
I believe that yes, logging on to the system cuts down on gaming, and keeps multiple voting down, although in the past, people have set up phony accounts in order to practice more digging. It also has other uses however. One goes back to the mention of auhority or reliabiity I mentioned before--you can determine who dugg, burried or commented on the story as well as who submitted it. It also helps to create communities and foster discussion.
I do think that information on Digg.com is more likely to be accurate than inaccurate and this is influenced by the wisdom of crowds because the people who vote on the submissions have determined that they agree with it in some way. Accuracy also has to do, however, with the fact that the stories are not an amalgamation of edits the way that Wikipedia is--and these edits can influence the accuracy of the story either way. The submission stays pretty much in its original form, or is changed by the original author (i.e. if changes are made to the website, etc). The accuracy of a story is not determined by the wisdom of crowds but by the author/creator. What is determined by the wisdom of crowds is the stories' popularity and potential popularity and power.
The others may have more to say about this, but for me, when I use Digg, I am looking for a specific topic and use the search options accordingly. Of course, one can get stuck on the front page, but one can also get stuck on the homepage of Wikipedia. Perhaps one is only finding more questions that are of interest to him or her, that s/he didn't realize were interesting. I don't think that distraction from the original question of interest (at least initially) is necessarily a detriment to obtaining true beliefs. It merely changes what it is that one is formulating true beliefs about.
Many thanks for your questions.
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