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Link aggregating sites and social media are rampant with abuse and shilling. It's the name of the game. From celebrities trying to pass off obviously paid tweet
by ebbv 13y ago
Link aggregating sites and social media are rampant with abuse and shilling. It's the name of the game. From celebrities trying to pass off obviously paid tweets as legitimate to every traffic driven/ad driven site engaging in shilling and upvote scamming.
It's pretty obivous to spot if you're a normal user of these types of sites.
But administrators usually have no incentive whatsoever to stop it unless the users actually get out the torches and pitchforks, and the administrators themselves are in danger of being called out as supporting this behavior. But in reality it's trivially easy for them to watch for it and stop it if they're interested in it.
I was in charge of a small, niche hobby forum that garnered about 20k visitors per day. Peanuts compared to anything larger, but even we had shills. I would spot it and stop it because I cared about the quality of the discussion far more than the number of posts or visitors.
Digg lost the number one spot because in its revision previously rather than stomping out shilling and vote scamming, Digg attempted to legitimize it and mainstream the sites that previously had engaged in nefarious acts to try to garner traffic.
Users are not innocent in this whole situation either; if they paid attention and reacted appropriately to shills and obvious voting abuse, the administrators would be forced to act responsibly. But users are apathetic most of the time, and often complicit in it.
- thedaveoflife 13y agoIn the same vein, aren't most newspaper articles simply PR in some form or another? The key is to be a savvy enough user to spot it.
- hobs 13y agoYep. Al Franken had a great piece he wrote about this when he was defending the claims of the liberal media and the like being biased against Bush. He went on to explain that most of the media is just an echo chamber, and repackaging a press release is much easier than actually doing work. A !ton! of "news" is just reposting reposts.
- nwzpaperman 13y agoPeople have the opportunity to write news, but the will to write news isn't there, yet. With ~9 months of open-beta under our belts and no interference or incentivizing content of any stripe, people just don't cover what's in front of them. Fundamentally, I believe this is because people have a herding instinct and seek to be a member of a larger group. It's also possible that community-level(local) issues are "too close to home" for non-professionals to risk community reputation on. Many people validate their positions--and themselves--by the quantity of people that agree with them which leads to holding popular positions. At certain points in time altruism and necessity meet to overcome these social forces, but it's usually only when crisis forces everyone to the table.
- Tossrock 13y agopg has an essay about this in fact: www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- aspensmonster 13y ago>But administrators usually have no incentive whatsoever to stop it Of course not. They're often the ones running the gig in the first place.