The taste of crowds.
I like Everett Rogers adoption curve because I find it explains quite a few different patterns. One of them we discussed recently at Zeus Jones was the abysmal taste of crowds. Unfortunately, we seem to have fallen for the utopian view that the masses are always right and have applied that concept everywhere.
While it’s true that our collective wisdom can lead to great results, that’s not true for their taste. From services like Digg to YouTube to iTunes to epinions, we rely upon popularity to provide some level of filtering for us. However as the chart above shows, what’s popular will always, over time, tend to the banal. By choosing to view, subscribe or read only what’s popular you essentially cut off the edges of your media. Lose the absolutely terrible but lose the potentially brilliant as well.
Chris Says:
June 12th, 2007 at 8:37 amEverybody loves this post.
Zeus Jones Says:
June 12th, 2007 at 9:33 amFunny, nice one
Mnels Says:
June 12th, 2007 at 3:50 pmThis thought reminds me of the engaging argument made By Nassim Taleb in “The Black Swan”. He refers to inference by the bell curve as “the great intellectual fraud” (GIF), because of the curve’s inability to represent the real significance of large deviations (the tails of the curve). It’s the stuff in the tails, the “Black Swans”, that truly matter. This book is worth a look if you haven’t seen it. The more I grasp how truly “uncertain” or undpredictable the world is, the more hopeful I am of our industry’s future. Creativity thrives in the tails.
Zeus Jones Says:
June 13th, 2007 at 1:13 pmThere ought to be a way to create an algorithm that only surfaces the stuff in the tails. It would provide endless amusement because it would let you sample the best and worst we can create. I think there’s a business here for an enterprising web 2.0 entrepreneur.
Measurements of engagement aren’t necessarily measurements of interest. | From The Head Of Zeus Jones Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 4:56 pm[...] is a cousin to the popularity problem that I wrote about before and which Noah wrote about this weekend. There are structures that the we [...]
You are not a gadget. | From The Head Of Zeus Jones Says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:09 pm[...] couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or i…. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the [...]
Planner Reads » Blog Archive » You are not a gadget. Says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:56 pm[...] couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innov…. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the [...]