Picking up from this post by Eran (read it first for context).
Here’s what I learned from the discussion so far:
- Posts about hacking Memeorandum are bad because we’re gaming the system. But … humans could filter out the badness!
- Posts about hacking Memeorandum are good because they lead to interesting discussions. But … the algorithm finds out that goodness!
Say a lot of people find discussions about gaming Memeorandum interesting (or for that matter Google, or eBay or car insurance premiums), and we can judge that by traffic. Then an algorithm that picks it up is just finding an interesting topic of discussion. Isn’t it doing exactly what we expect it to do?
Maybe we “gamed” the system, but we also learned something new. And if we didn’t learn anything new, why did we spent all that time posting about it and replying to posts about it? Are human beings just stupid at making conversations? Do we need other human beings to decide which conversations are interesting?
Personally, I’m an advocate of folksonomies over top-down categories, Wikipedia over any ivory tower encyclopedia, and for the exact same reasons Memeorandum over AOL content tzars. Much like democracy, none of these are perfect, but they’re better than anything else.