Posts Tagged: Twitter

technology — 2 Comments
18
Apr 09

The #Wisdom of Crowds

If you don’t live on the web, then you will have literally no idea what #amazonfail was. Don’t worry – it’s gone now, and I’m guessing it had absolutely no impact on your life. In the echo chamber that is the web, however, it was huge; and it’s had a twofold impact.

First it’s shown the way in which bonds of trust between retailer and consumer can be broken very easily on the web, which people seem to think is a big issue – as if anybody “trusts” a web retailer to do anything more than deliver on time, and as if anybody is going to remember this about a month from now. I am confident that the negative impact of #amazonfail will last all the way into next week and then be forgotten just like everything else on the web.

Second it’s clear that the web remains far from the dreams of the technotopians in terms of empowering people’s decision-making through providing better information. Clay Shirky’s mea culpa has attracted a lot of praise for providing a clear-eyed insight into the mechanics of mob rule on the web, but nobody’s noticed that it conceals more than it reveals. Let’s break it down:

  • Shirky is human.
  • Humans suffer from a huge range of cognitive biases.
  • These biases lead them to do stupid things without realising it.
  • In particular, people do really stupid things when they get into a crowd filled with lots of other people doing the same stupid thing (which is itself a bias).
  • Once those stupid things have been done, it’s almost impossible to go back on them, because that requires that you admit to yourself that you did something stupid (and that’s a whole psychological heory of bias).

To the casual observer of human behaviour,  none of these things will come as any surprise. That only makes it more surprising to find that although Shirky – a genuinely insightful thinker who has studied crowd behaviour for many years – realises that he fell into an obvious trap and now regrets it, he doesn’t seem to realise that this is what humans are like, and that no amount of technological progress is going to change that.

The comments on Shirky’s post are filled with people who joined the crowd and now refuse to face the fact that perhaps they were wrong – they’re still whining about how Amazon must have done something wrong, even if that something was “having a database”. My particular favourite is an attempted defense that Shirky links to (for balance) entitled Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch:

The issue with #AmazonFail isn’t that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing “false” to “true” in filtering certain “adult” classified items, it’s that Amazon’s system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of “adult”. And “gay” is part of “adult.” In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas.

Essentially her defense of the cognitive biases of #amazonfail is to attack the cognitive biases of Amazon, and it’s somehow moving to see this testimony to our common humanity, even if that testimony is utterly lacking in self-awareness. The epic fail of #amazonfail is an opportunity for many people to raise that level of self-awareness, but only a few such as Shirky will make the most of that opportunity.

technology — 4 Comments
18
Feb 09

When social software isn’t

Once again, Facebook has wandered into a minefield and then acted surprised when it lost a leg. In response to user protests, the company has reversed its policy regarding retention of personal data (as we all know, something of a bugbear of mine), in similar fashion to the reversal of policy regarding the Beacon advertising system. Why does this keep happening to Facebook, and why does it point out the fundamental flaw in Web 2.0 business models?

I’m a fan of Andrew Keen‘s critique of Web 2.0 as a viable alternative to existing media, but it’s hard for me to work up too much concern over the death of old media – as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a phase transition that we’re going through. In Chapter 4 of Predictably Irrational, however, Dan Ariely nails it when he describes the difference between social norms and market norms:

So we live in two worlds: one characterized by social ex­changes and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relation­ships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social ex­changes, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been com­mitted, recovering a social relationship is difficult.

The problem for web businesses – and particularly for Web 2.0 businesses – is that people enter into them on the basis of social norms. They’re free and they’re friendly, and everybody is welcome to the party, and so when we’re using them we assume that they’ll treat us in the same way as our friends would, keeping our confidences and not abusing our trust.

As soon as those businesses introduce market norms – i.e. as soon as they try to monetise the relationship, which every Web 2.0 business must do sooner or later (and preferably before the venture capital runs out) – then the bond is broken. The fundamental basis of Web 2.0 business – community rather than customer relationships – is not financially viable.

There are people who believe that Twitter (for example) can make money, but it’s telling that for all the wonderful suggestions made by bloggers over the last year, precisely none of them has been implemented. That doesn’t mean that Web 2.0 is dead, but anybody expecting to make any money from their investments is probably going to find their friends leaving the party to go next door.