Social Networking and Self-Regulation
the crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit
Posted Sun Sep 28, 12:15 PM in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions
Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.
Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.
Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.
In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.
For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.
Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.
Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.
To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.
So much for that.
It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.
Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.
To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.
At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.
Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.
Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.
Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?
An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.
Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.
Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.
Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.
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The Space Between Us
The developed world is balanced precariously on a bed of dependency
Posted Wed Sep 17, 05:03 PM in consumerism, environment, human nature, human resources, sustainability
The growth of the number of linkages that our society depends on has been staggering over the past century. If you look back at books that detail the lifestyles of pioneer families in the American West, or farmers in rural India, or peasants in England during medieval times, you’ll notice that there the organizational distance that took any given commodity from its point of growth or manufacture to the end user was quite small, and typically involved only a few parties. Nowadays, there are countless organizational linkages that are involved in any given product we might own.
Take this computer I’m typing on right now, for example. There were probably 100+ manufacturers involved in the creation of this computer if you include all the components and parts, and many of those manufacturers purchased parts from other manufacturers, and so on. When it comes down to it, maybe 50,000 people were involved in building this computer in some way. And while computers might be an extreme case, by no means is it atypical of the amount of organizational growth in the economy.
The number of middlemen and organizations that separate manufacturers from end users has increased dramatically. There are the people that source materials, people who manufacture them, people who store them, people who distribute them, and people who sell them. Compare that to the maybe 25-50 people that were probably involved in the creation and sale of everyday items in simpler times, where blacksmiths bought iron ore from some organization, forged tools from the iron, and sold the tools directly to end users.
Even if you held the number of items constant in a comparison of items in your home to that of a medieval person’s home, the number of people involved in the process of furnishing your home would dwarf the number of people involved in the processing of the home from a distant time ago. Consider even the house itself: your wood, nails, and tiles come from far away, and involve many transporters, salesmen, manufacturers, etc. A peasant’s hut in the middle ages was made from wood from a local forest that didn’t need to be transported far, and essentially crafted from scratch (that is, without many pre-manufactured parts) by locals.
In other words, the number of people who are working for you now is much, much higher that it was for people in the past. This is important for several reasons.
Firstly, this means that there is an interconnectedness in the current economy that was never experienced to this degree in the past. This is what Thomas Friedman describes as the “flattening” of the world (of course, as Matt Taibbi points out, this choice of phrase defies the significance of the word “flat,” since it was actually the roundness of the earth that made us realize the interconnectedness more than previously thought!).
Secondly, it means that there are many, many more things that can go wrong in the functioning of our society. If you are more dependent on more people to get you your daily food and water, it also suggests that there are more places where problems can develop, and many more ways in which the chain can fail. Any such failures in the chain will affect more people, which is bad not only because of the potential magnitude of the inconvenience (or perhaps crisis), but also because the ever extending length of this chain has divorced people from having basic knowledge how they can get what they might need in the absence of the middlemen.
Think about what would happen if there was a crisis in the supply chain that prevented food from getting to all the grocery stores in your area, and you can start to imagine the severity of this problem. Not only are people completely dependent on grocery stores to get them their food, but in the event that the stores are unable to provide, people have no idea how to get the food they need. They might figure out that they need to grow vegetables themselves, but would they know how to do that? Would they have space to do it?
People in third world countries are used to dealing with breakages in the chain. They don’t rely on electricity. They don’t depend on getting water delivered directly to their houses. For that reason, they have organically developed street smarts about how to get what they need whenever they need it, and they are never overreliant, or even confident, that the system will be able to deliver it to them.
While many in developed countries might look down on the apparent primitiveness of this situation, in many ways, it is the Westerners who are at a long-term disadvantage in a survivalist sense. They are the ones who can be easily brought down by something like a terrorist plot, an oil crisis, a natural disaster, or a transportation strike.
A friend of mine described how the recent onset of Hurricane Gustav took out power in her hometown in Indiana last week. As of yesterday— several days later— the power was still out. How well do you think the people were adapting to this? Certainly not as well as my relatives in my parents’ hometown in India would, since, for reasons that have never fully been explained, they don’t have power every Tuesday of the week.
You are what you say you are? Maybe not.
Posted Tue Sep 9, 05:52 PM in human nature, links, marketing, postmodernism
I found a thought-provoking post over at Violent Acres about the duplicity of so-called ‘personal branding’ and how many people feel comfortable with the idea of defining their character through their own words and ideas rather than through their behavior. The author writes about a hilarious and highly troubling incident with a woman who, deciding she’s a good person, overlooks the absolute heinousness of an action she is planning to undertake as a pet owner. Worth thinking about in relation to your own life.
On Self-Rationalization and Justification for Moral Lapses
We usually get what we want… somehow.
Posted Sun Sep 7, 03:22 PM in business models, consumerism, economics, experiences, human nature, law, marketing, politics
Some time back, I was sharing an office with someone, and had a shelf next to my desk that I had placed a few books on. One day, I came in to find that the shelf had been moved next to the other guy’s desk, and my books had been tossed upon my desk, along with a note explaining why my officemate needed that shelf more than I did, and how I would be able to get another shelf from some other person in the office if I really needed a shelf (this, of course, invites the question of why he didn’t get the shelf himself from some other person to begin with).
The rationalization in his head followed this trajectory:
1) I want a shelf for my things.
2) There’s a shelf over there.
3) And it only has a few books on it.
4) Given that it only has a few books on it, clearly the owner doesn’t really need that shelf.
5) Given that he doesn’t really need it and I do, I really deserve that shelf more than he does.
6) It’s wrong for him to have that shelf when I need it so much more.
7) I’m just going to take the shelf since I will receive greater utility value than him.
You can see how such self-rationalizing logic has a way of subverting standard social norms such as “ownership” and “right to use.” I was somewhat bothered by this turn of events, but once I started thinking about it, I realized that such behavior happens all the time, and enters into some of our most proverbial ethical dilemmas.
The question of Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?, for example, is another similar ethical quandary that enters into our popular consciousness.
However, one of the most prevalent examples of this in recent times is the issue of music downloading through P2P networks. The tech-savvy youth of the world, on the whole, have absolutely no problem with downloading copyrighted music from the internet (full disclosure: I have also done it before). This is despite the fact that most of the same people probably recognize stealing items from local stores as morally wrong.
But, comes the argument, this isn’t really theft. In a theft, someone is deprived of an item because someone else takes it. Here, something is being duplicated so I have a copy and the original owner still has his copy.
True. Yet, one could make the same argument about stealing cable, and I have not heard anyone argue that this is morally sound. After all, there are cable companies who have large amount of fixed assets tied up in cable lines, maintenance, and other expenses that come part and parcel of delivering cable. If everyone stole cable, clearly the cable television system would collapse. Is the same not true for the music industry?
Well yeah, but the music industry hasn’t adapted to changes in the market and the way that consumers want to shop.
Maybe, but in every other sphere of the consumer economy, if consumers don’t like the way that a company does business, they simply don’t do business with them. Why is it that you feel justified in stealing property in this case? If you really want a new Ford car, but you really hate Ford dealers, how is it that you are justified in stealing a Ford from their property so as to bypass interacting with the dealers?
Look, I’ll admit that this does hurt the record companies, but you know what? They deserve it. Those suit-and-tie business guys are all about the money; they couldn’t care less about the music, and in fact they’ve have done everything in their power to destroy music! I support the artists, and the record companies just screw them over anyway. Artists only get, like, 10 cents on every CD sale anyway. They make their real money off of touring.
But what gives you the right to decide that the artist shouldn’t have that 10 cents per CD? Sell a million albums, and that’s a lot of money. Isn’t that their decision to make?
Artists who say that are just being greedy! They’re already rich and famous and now they want even more money! Can you believe these guys?
But that’s their job. Surely you’d want to be paid for things you took time to develop and sell, right?
No way! I’m above that. If I were an artist, I’d be happy that people were listening to my music and coming to my shows. It’s all about the art, dude.
Just because it’s ‘all about the art’ for you, doesn’t mean that it’s ‘all about the art’ for everyone. Would you still feel the way you do once you were depending on that income for your livelihood, and your continuing ability to fund that livelihood?
Of course! I’m not looking to make money off records. I’d make my money of touring, and connecting with my fans, and selling merchandise and stuff.
What if you didn’t want to tour?
But that’s how you make money.
That’s one way you make money. The other part is selling records. What if you only want to sell records and that’s all? And don’t you, as the artist, have a right to choose the channels through which you distribute?
Ok, let’s stop this right here. You can see where this is going. Ultimately, the P2P downloader in this conversation is finding ways to justify his decision to download music. He gives all kinds of rationalizations for it, from blaming the companies, to blaming the artists, to giving ideological reasons, to technical explanations of why it’s not bad.
Clearly, this argument was built backwards. The downloader started with the idea of I want to have free, unrestricted access to any music I want whenever I want. From there, he found ways to justify any behavior that led to him getting that. This involved dismissing valid counterarguments through insular and self-justifying means that, while they might apply to his own worldview, are not necessarily shared by those who he is taking from. Nevertheless, he is able to project this ideological view of “how things should be” onto the world, and then convince himself that what he’s doing is actually the valorous thing to do, bravely fighting against an archaic system that enslaves and rips off consumers— when all he really wanted was the music to begin with.
Thus, a base drive to get free music has now taken on an ideological bent and has morphed into some kind of jihadist war on record companies. The guy could just have just admitted he wanted the free music. Why bother blowing all that smoke? Well, he doesn’t realize consciously that he is blowing smoke.
Apologists have this same problem. They’ve decided that George Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Alex Chiu, or James Dobson, or whoever is right. Now that they’ve come to this conclusion, they can no longer stop to evaluate events critically. Suddenly, they find themselves excusing all kinds of behavior that they would skewer someone else for; and not only will they overlook this behavior, they will defend it— passionately! After all, they wouldn’t want to admit that they were wrong about this person this whole time.
Strange thing, this cognitive dissonance.
Further reading:
Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Harcourt, 2007.
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The Pleasant Green Illusion of Trader Joe's
Why one of America’s fastest growing stores is not quite what it appears
Posted Tue Sep 2, 03:44 PM in branding, business, business models, consumerism, marketing, postmodernism, semiotics
I recently moved to Madison, WI, and found that my new apartment is just blocks away from the perennial grocery store of choice of the archetypal liberal, Trader Joe’s. Don’t get me wrong, I love Trader Joe’s. They have a somewhat interesting— if a bit odd— selection of food, low prices on alternative-lifestyle staples like Morningstar Farms Vegetarian Meats, Hummus, and Dr. Bronner’s Soap, and the staff usually seem engaged and friendly in a way that you rarely see in the bigger chains.
Yet despite these virtues, there’s always been something that I’ve found very curious and fascinating about the store given its primary clientele: they package the hell out of everything. I’m talking about putting often unnecessary plastic bags around nearly all their produce (which is, incidentally, prepackaged and shipped from afar), hard plastic shells around fruits and tomatoes, and things like individually wrapped biscottis inside paper bags of biscotti.
The produce sections of standard grocery stores like Kroger and Safeway aren’t much better, but you can tell that there’s a lot less waste going on, on the whole. You can buy fruits and vegetables without using a plastic bag at all, but if you choose to use one, very thin plastic bags on a roll are offered. You can stuff your plastic bag with as much salad mix as you want. The bags at Trader Joe’s are much thicker, presumably so that they can ship without incurring damage to the contents of the bag, but they are sealed so that if you want 10oz of salad mix, you’ll be forced to buy two packages of the stuff.
Now, the interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that if you talk to people about Trader Joe’s, you will see that many if not most of its clientele view the store as being ‘environmentally sound’, espousing the values prioritized by the politically and environmentally progressive consumer, words like: organic, sustainable, socially-conscious, green, fair-trade, healthy, whole-grain, eco-friendly, and so on.
Strangely, as the store is able to capitalize on those concepts, there is little in the direct customer experience that should really suggest any of those things any more than any other grocery store. Not all of Trader Joe’s produce is organic or whole-grain, not all of their coffee is fair-trade, and not all of their eggs and meat are cage-free or free-range. Few customers know anything about what Trader Joe’s has to say about labor rights, politics, or environmental issues, but if you asked, I would bet they’d place them in the top 20% of American companies in all these categories. And yeah, they sell canvas bags, but they still bag your groceries by default in paper bags.
Both Kroger and Safeway both have sections dedicated to organic and whole-grain foods. Both also sell fair-trade coffee and free-range eggs and meat.
So what exactly is going on here? Why does Trader Joe’s get a free pass on environmental concerns and get to capitalize on all the standard jargon of the socially-minded left while the other guys are left to be viewed as the mainstream guys who don’t really give a shit about anything but profits?
Part of it, I think, is that Trader Joe’s is a much smaller store than Kroger and Safeway. It’s a mere fraction of the size by volume, but they carry a similar variety of foods but certainly not the diversity of brands. And for that matter, many of the brands they do carry are not to be found in other grocery stores. They don’t, for example, carry Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Tropicana Orange Juice. Sometimes such products are on their own private label brand (whose name changes depending on what product it is; their Mexican products are stamped with “Trader Jose” and Italian products have the ridiculous name “Trader Giotto’s” on them). They also carry an unusually large percentage of imported or apparently exotic goods. These don’t by themselves convey the aforementioned concepts, but these features do set them apart in the minds of the consumers, which is important.
Another part of it, while subtle, is the décor. Contrast the feeling you get while walking in the close, friendly quarters of the Trader Joe’s store with one you get when walking the cold, labyrinthine halls of Kroger. Contrast the warm wood paneling and comparatively low ceilings of Trader Joe’s with the stony white floors and high ceilings of Safeway. Notice the prevalence of baskets in the Trader Joe’s store, and the gargantuan supermarket carts elsewhere.
Also, and this is important, notice the clientele. There is a very obvious difference in who the typical shopper in each of these stores is. It’s impossible to tell without some form of surveying, but I would be extremely surprised if the average Trader Joe’s shopper wasn’t more educated, of a higher socio-economic status, with a higher disposable income, and a more liberal bent. But is it the store’s ostensibly progressive values that attracts this clientele, or does the store get its progressive image from the people who shop there? Certainly, there’s a feedback loop happening here, but it’s also true that there wouldn’t be such an attraction to these sorts of people without some compelling cause.
One possible cause could be that progressives are attracted to each other and teem into places where there are people like themselves, even in the absence of any gastronomical pretense. Possible, but I don’t find it very likely to be the root cause in the case of Trader Joe’s; after all, why would this trend begin in the first place? A more convincing reason for the progressive psychographic’s descent onto this store is its decidedly eclectic selection of food, where exotic foods like shitake mushrooms and shelled edamame are placed fashionably next to staples like baby carrots, and exotic Hollandic stroopwaffels oh-so-nonchalantly next to chocolate chip cookies. This post-modern melting pot of food is likely the central point of resonance at Trader Joe’s. After all, if we are to cull the messages from all the progressive radio stations, left-wing talking points, bumper stickers, and Bay Area street fairs, it is this very quality of “diversity” that presents itself as some kind guiding principle of progressive thought and which shapes the idealistic visions of progressive society. It is in this world that “diversity” in itself is considered a virtue, even in the absence of any dialectic.
Of course, diversity of foodstuffs is one thing, but where does the image of social consciousness come from? The household cleaners aisle, which is right next to where you’d buy “natural” toothpaste (do Poloxamer 335 and Propylene Glycol really count as natural?), doesn’t feature the usual allotment of chemicals like Ajax and Windex, but instead has products like all-purpose ‘natural’ orange cleaner made from degreasing compounds apparently found in citrus fruits, and mouthwashes with tell-tale signs of products that are trying to market themselves as ‘natural,’ muted brownish packages.
And speaking of muted packaging, it just might be that as a whole, Trader Joe’s packaging is of a more muted health-food store color than their mainstream rivals. With the notable exception of the produce section where colors like brown and white are not typically indicators of quality, the remainder of the store makes use of these earth tones in a manner not consistent of mainstream stores, where bright colors and fluorescence are used in packaging the same way that circus carnies shout and prod passers-by with their staccato brayings.
Trader Joe’s expertly weaves a tapestry that references all the signals that progressives look for and can relate to in their political identity, but much of the “follow-through” is only implied. But the store has called out so many of these reference points, that it creates the illusion that it’s all there—an illusion that many of the store’s patrons seem to appreciate as much as if it really were.
UPDATE (11/12/08):
I had an interesting encounter the other day as I was shopping in Trader Joe’s. In the seafood section, my girlfriend and I noticed that they were selling orange roughy. This particular fish is one that is listed as endangered, as it takes nearly 30 years for it to reach maturity— far longer than most commercial fish— and it has a long lifespan as well, often living up to 150 years. With the U.S. fishing industry hauling in about 19 million tons of the fish a year, and many of those fish being more than a hundred years old, it is not an exaggeration to say that this fish may be extinct within our lifetime.
Regardless, we were perturbed by the presence of this fish at this ostensibly progressive grocery store, and decided to talk to the management about why they are selling this endangered fish— at $6.99 a pound, no less. The manager was quite up front about it. “We don’t consider ourselves a ‘green’ company,” he said, obviously a little tired of once again having to answer to the legions of progressives that shop at Trader Joe’s, and explain why they stock items perceived as being unsustainable or hostile to liberal consumption ideologies. He continued: “We let our customers vote with their dollars about what we put on our shelves, and though I understand your concerns, we sell a LOT of orange roughy.” He tilted his head towards the sky when he said ‘lot.’
So there’s the confirmation. The idea that Trader Joe’s is a somehow progressive or green company is a total myth created by the brand’s phenomenal marketing— which is largely based on word-of-mouth.
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