Herding the Mob

Wired by Annalee NewitzPage | Mar. 6, 2007 (Special Report)

Today we harness the masses for everything from choosing the next pop star on American Idol to perfecting open source software and assembling Wikipedia articles. But perhaps the most widespread and vital uses for group input online are in scoring systems. In addition to eBay feedback, these are the customer ratings that Amazon.com and Yahoo Shopping post with product reviews. They're the feedback scores that Netflix tallies to help subscribers decide which ... Full Story »

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4.2

by Bob McInnis - Oct. 1, 2008

A well written article showing that we can turn most everything into a popularity contest.

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4.5

by Ari Hakkarainen - Oct. 1, 2008

Fascinating. Innovative new services are truly useful, but have fundamental weaknesses. This is a well researched story. It would be nice to learn about solutions as well, but that topic is worth a new article.

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4.4

by Veronica Barlee - Oct. 1, 2008

well-written, succinct, informative article about peer-rating systems and how they can be manipulated.

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2.6

by Kevin Doyle Jones - Oct. 1, 2008

Wired has been excoriated throughout the blogosphere for the inherent conflict of interest; their parent company owns a lower profile competitor of digg. they should not have done this story without seeing if they could use the same manipulative techniques on reddit, their own competitor. bad bad bad.

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