The dark side of social aggregation: the bandwagon effect
This is an older draft entry which was seemingly never published, but is still relevant, in the context of our discussion of governance in Wikipedia, and its lowest-common-denominator effects.
Here it is:
There is a very important blog entry in Joshua Porter’s Bokardo blog, which monitors social design issues, i.e. how design influences social behaviour.
It refers to a study by noted network researcher Duncan Watts, which was reported on in the New York Times.
It summarizes the important finding: in sites which aggregate collective judgment, such as Digg, the rating and the download figures influence the decisions of users. In other words, it creates a feedback loop and bandwagon effect, so that people are not choosing quality, but popularity, and so early entrants have an advantage.
Please do read that summary in full.
January 20th, 2008 at 6:21 am
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