This Wired article should be required reading for all social media aficionados (hat tip to my bro, Graham who always manages to find the stuff I wish I had found) . It outlines several of the main scams used to manipulate the audience on sites like eBay and Digg.

The article makes an extremely interesting point about how much trust we place in the mob over what to buy (ebay, epinions, etc, ratings) and what to read (Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. rankings) and what to view (YouTube, Flickr comments and votes etc.)

There is no doubt that all of these companies have teams of dedicated and smart people trying to ferret out the people scamming the system and I sincerely wish them Godspeed. However, we should always remember that the unscrupulous bastards have way more financial upside in gaming the system than the security department workers will get for ferreting out the scammers and plugging the holes.

Despite all of these issues I still think that on average we are all probably safer trusting strangers’ web votes, comments and rankings for what is hot than the content cartels fiction represented by the book bestseller lists, Chart-topping music, Neilson ratings and Weekend Box-office receipts.

[tags]Wired, eBay, Digg, YouTube, social media, voting[/tags]

This entry was posted on March 6, 2007 at 9:55 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Issues Social Media Tech Web 2.0 by dwalker No Comments Yet