Fark Creator Slams 'the Wisdom of Crowds' 507
GovTechGuy writes with some harsh words from Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, speaking at a conference Tuesday in Washington, DC: "'The "wisdom of the crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.' Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.' Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Charles Mackay (Score:5, Informative)
Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay (first published in 1841). His book discusses Tulip-mania in the Netherlands and witch persecutions (and many more incidents) to illustrate the distinct LACK of wisdom of crowds.
Re:Wisdom of the crowd. (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean new [despair.com]?
This got an "Obvious" tag on Fark, of course. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Charles Mackay (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wisdom of the crowd. (Score:2, Informative)
Just in case some of you remember those lines but can't quite remember which movie it was from [imdb.com].
Re:Fark.com (Score:3, Informative)
Strangely enough, Fark links to genuine news that should be more prominent than it actually is.
Weird news is still news.
Re:One man's "garbage"... (Score:1, Informative)
I was banned about 5 or 6 years ago for providing an RSS feed to fark.com
Back then, Fark did not have one. One of my friends coded a perl parser, and I hosted it/scheduled it. It was providing a great service to the Fark community.
As soon as I commented about it, my account got disabled. I thought it was an error. I tried to contact them..no answer.
I created a 2nd account. As soon as I posted about my RSS link (I did NOT add any publicity or make any money out of this whatsoever), I got banned again.
Then a few months later, Fark had an official RSS feed..
Bottom line: Wisdom of crowds can't be as big as doucheyness of Drew.
Re:It cuts both ways (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Charles Mackay (Score:3, Informative)
The main lesson of the past decade is that people fresh off the dot-com bubble fell for the real-estate/finance bubble. People just don't learn from experience.
Re:Irony (Score:2, Informative)
Did you read that book?
Just from the Wikipedia article (which could be wrong)... The author says that crowd intelligence needs four things to succeed: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. Aggregation being defined as "[A mechanism] for turning private judgments into a collective decision." A strong leader fits that definition.
There is a big difference between the crowd of random (but not necessarily diverse) people acting with no direction or organization to which Drew Curtis refers and the well-constructed, organized crowd to which that author refers, and both seem to be saying the same thing: crowd intelligence is based on choosing a diverse population, keeping those people thinking independently, and having a leader aggregate the information.
Re:Irony (Score:3, Informative)
Some people hear the Emperor's New Story and think, "Well of course a *kid* isn't gonna see the emperor's clothes ... only refined folk see them, right?"
Of course, they don't say it outright, but they have analogous reactions to e.g. when renowned violinist Joshua Bell played The Best Violin Music In The World on The Best Violin In The World while posing as a bum on the subway, no one gave a shit ... because they weren't pre-conditioned in the received common wisdom that, "Oh, you have to recognize this as good music." Just look at the rationalizations people try to give for how that experiment doesn't prove anything about the quality of "high class" music.
Re:Fark.com (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wisdom of the crowd. (Score:5, Informative)
Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat
Argh! No, they didn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_myth [wikipedia.org]