Elements of wise crowds: Diversity, Independence, Decentralization, Aggregation
Small Simple Tasks: example - Hot or Not?
Blank comment form = petrie dish. Without guidance you get mold
Large Diverse Groups: Important because they prevent group think (priorities of the group ahead of individuals)
Design systems to encourage participation
Lower barriers of entry to get more voices
Design for selfishness
Large groups of people don't participate in your "happy thing" unless they're getting something out of it.
Users ask "Is this worth my time?"
Selfish needs can be harnessed to make something wise.
When I tag my photos in Flickr, I'm not trying to create anything more than a way to find my own photos. Our selfish motivations can become business value is properly harnessed.
Result Aggregation: How to take all that noisy stuff and turn it into something smart
Scores create games.
Taking votes, creating lists of winners/losers. Scores create games. How do you take the aggregate and make something useful without turning it into a game.
favrd.com aggregates Twitter favorites and shows the top fav'd tweets.
favrd.textism.com Favrd - what the crowd in Twitter voted as favourite tweet. Really funny snippets of text. No public voting mechanism. Not DIGG, just monitor normal behaviour without asking them to vote.
The Heisenberg Problem: Scoreboards make the goal to participate to get on the scoreboard, and not necessarily in a positive way.
Once we surface the list to the world, we create a new motivation - to be top on the leaderboard. Flickr "interestingness" created a game, to be #1 on this list. Takes the ranking and created an incentive for bad behaviour: spamming, bugging people to vote/comment. Changed to a random collection of interestingness photos, away from a ranked list, it makes it interesting, useful and less of a game.
[Same can be said for Twitter followers – people try to get more followers at whatever the cost and stupid crap comes up like TwitterGrader to encourage it –A]
Popularity does not have to rule.
The most popular thing is often not the best thing.
Explicit feedback vs. implicit feedback. Tons of explicit controls, sliders, buttons, checks.
He just dropped the "It depends" bomb.
Implicit vs. Explicit Feedback: Never use more options than you think you need
Most 5-star rating systems boil down to 2.5/3.5 – thumbs up and thumbs down more discrete choice for users.
Implicit Feedback: Pageviews, Searches, Velocity, Interestingness.
Implicit vs Explicit Feedback. Explicit, like voting/rating widgets. Implicit feedback like monitoring pageviews, searches, velocity (how much is something changing), interestingness (algorithms).
How you ask questions changes the answers you get.
kvetch.com A complaints department by Powazek (presenter).
Classic. Powazek showing colors to the crowd, asking for emotional reaction. Red: "Anger!" Blue screen goes up, Tom Purves shouts out, "Microsoft!"
brooklynmuseum.org allowed people to rate photos and say 'who' they are: expert, beginner, etc. so photos are curated/displayed, bigger photos are printed larger.
getsatisfaction.com using wisdom of crowds techniques very effectively. "I like that idea" to tally up important issues by company/product. Data is aggregated to show the best post. Aggregated data shown for 'marked best', 'replies made', 'people participating'. Also, 'the mood in here' to aggregate how posters are describing their feeling.
If you take away some of that input, we do the opposite – brains work twice as hard to fill in the blanks to make a story in our head. Our brains are great at taking a lot of feedback and weaving it into a story. This is how we understand the world.
This is relevant online because we're deprived from all input we get in real-life social situations like expressions, emotions, etc. All we have is text to relate to each other. Therefore, brains work twice as hard to fill in that missing data. What we typically fill in those blanks is a by-product of our insecurities.
When you feel out of control, you make up stories that don't have anything to do with what you're being shown.
When we show more data, there's less reason for our brain to make up shit.
"My challenge to you: Wisdom of Crowds systems provide context, fill in the missing spaces, see patterns in the chaos."
Challenge for designers: How can we bring wisdom of crowds to communities we create. How do we give people 'in-control' experiences that make them less crazy online.
Q&A time.
Spend 60 seconds to tell me about something your passionate about. Get people in touch with something they care about, the feeling of being out of control disappeared. Give people tools for being in control to make them less crazy.
Q: What role does curation play in gathering/presentation of data?
A: We get so excited about wisdom of crowd scenarios that we sometimes forget to participate too. Every crowd has a ringleader/moderator/curator. If you can't name them, that person is you. Digg gets in shit all the time because they shoot down editors (but they still fuck with the algorithm). Altering the algorithm is curation, it's like changing the 'recipe' for the algorithm. Don't be anti-curator because everything needs a curator.
Q: What can we learn from most popular vs. most e-mailed? (like for a NYT story)
A: Should take all of those things and mix them up. It would make the system harder to game and would be a more authentic representation of the community.
Q: Any specific examples of more complex user feedback interfaces that gather more complex data?
A: Forum conferencing software is incredibly complicated. Having a blank box makes you think a lot about what you're entering.
Q: Crowd is very small for most sites on the Net. What are your thoughts on pulling wisdom from a big group without it being ridiculous? (YouTube employee. LOL)
A: Sites like Flickr/YouTube are incredibly diverse. Does everyone feel inclined to participate or feel intimidated by the rowdy commenters. Discussion systems fall prey to groupthink. (Tipping Point - Graffiti causes crime). If there's a lot of noise to start, it turns away better participation. Trick: How to include lots of people without having lowest common denominator rule.
That's a wrap!
AdamSchwabe
mapgoblin
thody
Greeblemonkey
remarkk
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