30/10/06
Trust Metrics
Seth has a post about how YouTube (and Reddit / Digg) spammers, are posioning the waters for everyone:
As the ‘bestseller’ lists on YouTube and Reddit and other places become more and more important, they’re also going to become less useful. Less useful because the manipulators are way more focused and earnest than the typical consumer, and they’ll figure out a way to get under whatever radar gets installed.
At some point, it’s going to come down to who we trust. We didn’t trust Beechnut after we find out they put water in the apple juice. We didn’t trust Audi for a decade, even though there wasn’t anything actually wrong with their car. And we won’t trust Enron, Worldcom or Adelphia with our money for a long time to come.
It all comes down to trust metrics – another Alexism – and for which he directs us to Advogato. It’s going to be vital for any kind of community site – or any site for that matter – to be able to differentiate between ’spam’ and ‘real’ content. This of course is the old signal / noise quandry – but it too is going to be at the fore when it comes to ongoing execution of sites as they become large enough to make it worth the spammer’s while to try to hack them.
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