Oct

4

Dave Winer Figured it Out

October 4, 2007 |

Why Techmeme is a cesspool (love the use of tinyurl to not give more attention to the links):

Techmeme was already severely polluted by people saying stupid shit to rise to the top of the page. That was an ephemeral high. Now there’s a way to accumulate points toward more persistent rank, and everyone who isn’t on the list, wants to be on the list.

I’m thinking of this idiotic post by an idiot who’s known for saying idiotic things just to get attention.

Or Scoble, who started on the list near the bottom — is rapidly rising. How’s he doing it? By saying extreme things that people will react to. That’s how you get points in the Techmeme universe. Scoble ain’t no idiot. If he wants to rise on the list, he rises.

Later on, Dave calls Techmeme worse than AM radio. I am not sure I want to go that far. Michael Savage is hard to beat.

Techmeme has its uses. Gabe Rivera will figure out a way to shut these things down if they don’t cool down after the novelty wears off.

Or is Dave just saying all of this to get attention? (Update: That’s what Mike Arrington seems to think. He points out that he thinks this is childish…).

Update: Scott Karp has weighed in with with some disincentives for gaming Techmeme:

More weight to the source of the first headline, and less to subsequent subsidiary headlines

More weight to items published earlier, i.e. less incentive to add redundant contributions late in the game

Less weight to sources that do nothing but latch on to existing headlines and never produce their own original headlines

Less weight to all participants in an attention grabbing pile on — objective markers might include a lot of convoluted cross-linking

He has some good points there.

I would add, though, that there these days, I see a lot of people just tagging on to headlines on Techmeme without making any contribution to the conversation whatsoever.

A post where more than 50% of the post is just a quote should raise a red flag. I thought Techmeme already had a similar algorithm in place, but it doesn’t seem to be working well these days.

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