Crowds vs. Herds

If you look at Surowiecki's requirement for a wise crowd (versus a herd), you'll see that he asserts the requirement of a few things (pulled straight from <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds</a>):<p><i>Diversity of opinion</i>: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.<p><i>Independence</i>: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.<p><i>Decentralization</i>: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.<p><i>Aggregation</i>: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision. <p>I would think that for most sites the first three would be the greatest challenges. The worst part is probably that what's most popular is getting greater exposure, thus making it more popular . . .

A community is just a set of people and customs. Both aspects can evolve significantly in a short amount of time unless control is asserted in one way or another to prevent this possibility.<p>I don't think it is a sign of success or failure that communities have evolved, but just simply that they have evolved. I also don't think that every community wants to be boring eventually. In fact, many communities exert intense control so that this doesn't happen (barriers to entry for new members, moderation, etc.). It all depends on how it is set up, monitored, and controlled. <p>Finally, I also don't think that wide adoption necessitates being boring. Plenty of communities are heavily moderated/edited/whatever and still have a wide following. Extreme examples are newspapers, movies, and tv shows. Communities crop up around them, but most people have little control over what is published. This is interestingly slowly changing though with TV shows and newspapers. Comments on stories and online fan boards are starting to influence publishing, but it is still filtered in such a way that an attempt is made to keep it distinctly not boring.

I think to get wisdom out of really large crowds you need something like pagerank.

Well, one has to build the technology to maintain clusters of groups, not one big ball of people talking to each other at the same time. Sorry, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but social groups are a hot topic, so: Read <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a> :) it's a good read, you'll enjoy it. It perfectly captures all the issues between early adopters vs later adopters vs huge crowds.