Tim O’Reilly on Techmeme

Tim O’Reilly has a great post, finding a synthesis between Facebook app uptake, the recent Quant meltdown, and Techmeme piling on behavior. It is only the latter that I will touch on here:

[from Facebook, the Quant Fund Meltdown, and the Techmeme Leaderboard]

[…]

When reviewing the Techmeme leaderboard, and then bouncing from there over to Techmeme itself, I was struck by the fact that the surest way to stay up on the leaderboard is to make sure to comment on stories that are currently appearing on the front page of techmeme! This is a self-reinforcing system, where all of the major tech blogs end up covering the same stories. Yes, someone always breaks the news, but you see this amazing pile-on effect. I’m not sure it’s healthy.

In thinking about the future of collective intelligence, we need to make sure that we not only think about systems that lead to convergence of opinion, but also ones that ensure divergence, and fresh inputs. The surest way I know to get this is not to pay attention to the breaking news in your own pond, but to find the next community over, and to create new cross connections. Once the connections are well established, move on.

[…]

One of the tensions we struggle with all the time is how much energy to put into following areas we’ve uncovered that are now well known, and how much to spend on exploring the unknown.

This observation has to be considered from both macro and micro perspectives:

• On the personal level, an individual only has to spend some amount of time wandering around the web, staying away from the groupthink that emerges at sites like Techmeme. This is one of the reasons I don’t like sitting in an RSS reader, too: I want to travel the sidelinks, the trackback, and errant pointers that increase the incidence of bumping into something truly novel, or some new unique perspective.

  (It’s a side note, but I was struck by Matt Biddulph’s (from Dopplr) recent use of the term ‘Coincidensity’ to denote (I think) the fact that the likelihood of bumping into interesting people goes up as the people are closer together. I think I want to extend the term in this context, to assert that to increase the coincidensity of novel ideas bumping into you you have wander around to increase your chances.)
  
  

• On the social level, if people opt to game the system at Techmeme, and the system rewards that, you will see piling on. Sometimes piling makes sense — as when some new shiny tool is released and everyone fools with it or opines about it. Other piling on behavior is linkbaiting: a half-baked observation couched in incendiary prose, leading to a bar fight. In the latter case, the tool maker should be interested in countering the likelihood that such behavior leads to uppage on the list. Digg spends a awful lot of time countering nefarious schemes, and ultimately, Gabe Rivera will have to decide how to shape the culture at Techmeme.

I recently agreed — more or less — with Jason Calacanis that Techmeme is reflective of the way popularity works in general, which is not “fair” in an egalitarian sense, but which works, more or less. At the same time, I lust for a lot more random input, and strongly suggest that people only treat Techmeme as one food group in a healthy web diet: go forage for more roughage out past the top 5000 tech blogs in the world, or read the stuff that’s not on Techmeme today.

I personally hanker after the tool I designed for AOL — a project that has been sidelined based on the politics and downsizinggoing on there. Nerdvana is an application that memetracks what your trusted sources are commenting on. I could care less about the opinions of many of the folks that are the in-crowd at Techmeme, while many of them are wonderful. And I trust a number of people who aren’t included as sources there.

Anyone who is interested should ping me, because I would still like to build Nervana. It solves a real problem.

And it might take the pressure of Techmeme: in a world where people could balance the supposed wisdom of the technorati with the opinions of those they trust, the power of Techmeme — if that’s what it is — would be diluted in a very grassroots and social way.