Have you read the The Wisdom of Crowds ? , It was published in 2004, written by James Surowiecki. Its about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. That sounds like Digg, Fark and other user voted sites.
According to Surowiecki the advantages he sees in disorganized decisions fall into three main types, which he classifies as:
- Cognition
- Market judgment, which he argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts, or expert committees
- Coordination
- Coordination of behavior includes optimizing the utilization of a popular restaurant and not colliding in moving traffic flows. The book is replete with examples from experimental economics, but this section relies more on naturally occurring experiments such as pedestrians optimizing the pavement flow, or the extent of crowding in popular restaurants. He examines how common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture.
- Cooperation
- How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance. This section is especially pro-free market.
The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. There are parallels with statistical sampling theory—a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to be more representative of the universe of possible outcomes, thereby producing a better prediction.
And he also includes a criteria for a smart mob.
Four elements required to form a wise crowd
Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble. Refer to Failures of crowd intelligence (below) for more examples of unwise crowds. According to Surowiecki, these key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:
- Diversity of opinion
- Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence
- People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization
- People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation
- Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
That describes all the user voted content that I see on the web today.
The book also contains numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
Definitely a must read for anyone that is interested in the value of user voted content.
Source: The Wisdom of Crowds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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