ScribbleLive

Small Simple Tasks: example - Hot or Not?

Large Diverse Groups: Important because they prevent group think (priorities of the group ahead of individuals)

Lower barriers of entry to get more voices

Large groups of people don't participate in your "happy thing" unless they're getting something out of it.

Selfish needs can be harnessed to make something wise.

Result Aggregation: How to take all that noisy stuff and turn it into something smart

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.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.

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.

Popularity does not have to rule.

Explicit feedback vs. implicit feedback. Tons of explicit controls, sliders, buttons, checks.

Implicit vs. Explicit Feedback: Never use more options than you think you need

Implicit Feedback: Pageviews, Searches, Velocity, Interestingness.

kvetch.com A complaints department by Powazek (presenter).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A: Forum conferencing software is incredibly complicated. Having a blank box makes you think a lot about what you're entering.

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.