Comment Building dumocracy
I STARTED OUT my
rant on Digg.com with a quote from a Tom Lehrer piece mocking folk songs as products of the people. If Mr Lehrer was still in comedy, he would have a far richer source of material in the Web 2.0 set than he ever had in the 50s and 60s. The whole product of the people shows how desperately stupid the average web user really is.
The grand social experiment that is sites like Digg and Wikipedia stared out with simple and noble ideals, in that order, but have steadily decreased in quality and competence to become a running joke, and home to the dregs of the internet. They are the domain of the disenfranchised stupid, the virtual corner bar for the loud portion of the ignorant set, and are quickly drowning out any voices of reason that try and counter the stupidity. Welcome to Web 2.0, short may it reign.
Like most of the other net fads, the various pieces will get lots of attention, headlines, occasionally money, and then flame out. Remember Marimba and push? How about Altavista? Huge press, interesting ideas, large traffic, and now dead or forgotten. Web 2.0 will be the same way soon, its demise hastened by the very morons who populate it.
For some reason, someone
resubmitted the article above, and proved most of my point about Digg and how utterly worthless the site is. The original article had a few points to make, the algorithm as set at the time was skewed in favour of the vocal few, Digg staff were as smart as they were friendly, and anyone could game the site on a whim.
The brainchild who submitted the story, in the grand tradition of Digg, entirely missed the point that my criticisms were taken into account and the algorithms changed to mostly fix this. Since then, Digg has fell victim to a host of other problems, mostly their users, but the article criticisms are more or less fixed now.
The old stupidity is dead, long live the new stupidity. The points about people with an axe to grind and far too much free time however went from exploiting a flaw to being the new flaw, the site is now a bastion of the lowest common denominator. Read the comments on the new link and you will understand what I mean in vivid detail.
I first became aware of the repost when I started getting flame mails, the likes of which make PS3 fanboys looks smart and Apple zealots look like utter geniuses. From the mails I got to the comments, it is painfully obvious that the vast majority of the Digg set isn't much for reading, and possesses far less comprehension skills than their meagre reading ability. Translation, they are for the most part dumber than rocks.
That's not to say that there are not smart people there, several show up in the comments, but the majority of them make you wonder how they remember to breathe on a regular basis. They either didn't read the article, didn't understand the very simple points made, or suffered blunt head trauma as a child. This is not an impediment to posting on Digg, in fact, it looks like a prerequisite to getting your article noticed.
Herein lies the seeds of Web 2.0's demise, user stupidity. For those of you who were around on the net in the early pre-web days, it was a place of intellect, high IQs, and general quality discussions. Then came the black day when AOL was allowed into Usenet, and the average IQ of the posts dropped by 50 points or more. It hurt to watch, but owning a computer in that time meant a barrier to entry so it was not as bad as it may sound. The net survived the onslaught.
With the Internet now open to anyone, and the barrier to entry dropping with every new Web 2.0 app or site that hits the market, we now get to see how shatteringly bad the lowest vocal subset of average is. Go to Digg or Wikipedia, and you will quickly see what I mean. The domains of the interesting and smart were invaded by the stupid and loud, and as always happens, the smart lived up to their name and sought out higher ground. With each passing day, the sites shifted downward until you were left with the reality TV set. You know, those who watch pro wrestling with utter amazement at the deep plots, snorting while they laugh at each twist and turn.
These are the core constituents of Web 2.0. If you can shout, and spend more time flooding the boards with things you have some irrational emotional attachment to, you will win on these sites. Complex and interesting things will never hit the front page, that would mean the denizens of the sites would need to understand them, and have a preponderance of other doing the same. The problems is that the people who would understand things like nuance are fleeing rapidly, most are long gone.
It is a self reinforcing behaviour that brings us things like CNN and Fox, the dumber you are, the bigger your audience. The problems of Middle East peace negotiations are fairly relevant, but snakes may be in your backyard waiting to eat your dog when you turn off the lights. The average local news show caters to which subset of the population again. The more things slide, the faster they slide. Then you are left with Wikipedia and Digg. There are shining moments of clarity and islands of intellect, but they are few and far between. Welcome to Web 2.0, may it soon be replaced by Web 3.0.
The INQuirer
Threaded Mode
