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January 19, 2004
Marko on Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Blogging
Posted by Clay Shirky
Marko has posted
a long and fascinating addition to the conversation on blogging,
inequality, and
justice. I have only read it once, too cursory a viewing of such careful work to reply, but I wanted to flag its appearance immediately.
The first mistake – lets call it the “Natural Social Institutions” view – is the simplistic but widely held view that the patterns resulting from the operation of freely forming networks are acceptable because the rules of operation of these networks are in some sense natural. “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality,” Clay writes. “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome…[I]t arises naturally.”
Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, yes, but how much inequality comes out in the wash is determined by a complex mix of institutional arrangements – including informational feedback mechanisms – as well as other factors influencing individual linking behavior. Clay has acknowledged as much by pointing to David Sifry’s Technorati Interesting Newcomers List and later by sketching several possible strategies in modifying the power law distribution. But Clay avoids the mistake only part of the way. He still gives the “natural power law” a kind of moral priority in his picture. The reason this is a mistake is that there is no way in which we can meaningfully say that “the blogging world without the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List” is in any way natural, or the baseline from the point of view of justice, in comparison to “the blogging world with the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List.” Neither has a special claim to be the baseline of moral analysis. It’s not as if there is one distribution and then we tinker with it. In order to answer the question of justice we need to agree on some further point of view from which to judge the justice of the rules and the resulting distributions.
Read the whole thing. Really.
Comments (7)
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1. Lindon on January 19, 2004 9:56 PM writes...
well done Clay posting thiis referece, I knew you'd come thru for me...
Permalink to Comment2. milk on January 19, 2004 10:21 PM writes...
what exactly does 'inequality' refer to? number of blog readers, or placing in blog ranking systems?
Permalink to Comment3. Clay Shirky on January 20, 2004 7:07 AM writes...
Milk, funny you should ask that question...
The two meanings you've pointed to are generally elided, so that 'link-rich' and 'popular' are presumed to be roughly synonymous. Thus 'alpha blogger' can mean someone with a lot of linky love &| someone who gets a lot of traffic.
Tom Coates and I are looking at a new data set, taken by comparing sitemeter and link rank stats, and while we've found that there is a strong correlation between links and traffic at the system level, there isn't at the level of the individual weblog. It's safe to say that if you divide the weblog world in fifths by link rank, the top fifth has more links and more traffic than the next fifth, and _many_ more links and _much_ more traffic than the bottom fifth.
If, however, you compare the weblog in the #100 position with the weblog at #101, you have no guarantee that #100 gets more traffic than #101.
It's like the weather, in other words. It's safe to predict that December 23 will be colder than July 23, but not that December 23 will be colder than December 22.
My hypothesis is that the correlation between links and traffic is becoming unglued, for several reasons:
a. Links are grossly unequal as measures of traffic. An Instapundit link and an Indepundit link are of very different values. This could help explain the lopsidedness -- it could be that the sites whose traffic rank is much higher than their link rank are linking to one another in higher numbers.
b. Link context affects traffic -- blogrolls send less traffic than article links. (Would be interesting to study what percentage of posted links on the average site come from places listed in the blog roll. I am presuming the number is tiny.)
c. As weblogs become less personal expression and more lightweight publishing tool, a number of blogs get a significant amount of traffic from outside the blogosphere (e.g. Gizmodo, which is low on the link chart but very high on traffic.)
All of which is an incredibly long-winded way of saying "When people talk about inequality, they mean both link structure and popularity, but as those characteristics diverge, we are going to have to become more specific."
Permalink to Comment4. Tim Keller on January 20, 2004 9:22 AM writes...
Links are grossly unequal as measures of traffic. An Instapundit link and an Indepundit link are of very different values.
Google knows this, that's what PageRank is all about.
I still don't see what any of this has to do with fairness.
Tim
Permalink to Comment5. anon on January 20, 2004 10:49 AM writes...
"Inequality", however defined, is not a matter for concern in the marketplace of ideas that is the blogsphere. Those that work hard, are interesting and innovative, or have unique insight and creativity will rise to the top one way or another - just as in any market. Those that would seek to remedy a perceived injustice done to low-traffic / low-link bloggers that may hold uninteresting (in the measured aggregate) or unpopular (as defined by a given political / social / psychological position) do not serve the cause of free and open discourse - rather, the any measures they may advocate will (wittingly or not) begin to impose a mechanism of distortion that is open to those that would game the system for their own ends. And this corrupted mechanism is more of an injustice than an author who cannot draw an audience because he simply cannot write, or even because he simply came to late to the party and found all the other people had already said the interesting things earlier and found themselves at the center of the conversation.
Permalink to Comment6. Tim Keller on January 20, 2004 11:37 AM writes...
Those that would seek to remedy a perceived injustice done to low-traffic / low-link bloggers that may hold uninteresting (in the measured aggregate) or unpopular (as defined by a given political / social / psychological position) do not serve the cause of free and open discourse - rather, the any measures they may advocate will (wittingly or not) begin to impose a mechanism of distortion that is open to those that would game the system for their own ends.
There is a book, a novel, about this. In it, society has decided that the source of problems in the world is inequality. The solution is to make everybody equal by handicapping those who have some special ability or talent. If you're athletic, you have to wear lead weights in your shoes. If you're a gifted artist, you get fitted with clumsy mittens.
The protagonist of the story is multi-talented in the extreme. He's gifted physically and mentally, like nobody in his generation. So they put mittens on his hands, weights on his feet, alarm clocks on his ears to keep him from concentrating.
Does anybody know who wrote this and what its title might be? It seems apropos.
Tim
Permalink to Comment7. Clay Shirky on January 20, 2004 11:47 AM writes...
Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut - http://penguinppc.org/~hollis/personal/bergeron.shtml
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