He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed.
I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
"He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system."
So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
No one's disputing that. What's broken about the naive implementation of social news is the degree to which a small group of true believers can take it over.
You'll have seen this before with Lisp on Reddit. Some people always upvote, some people always downvote, some people downvote because they're tired of seeing it, and the vast, vast majority simply have no opinion. To them, the words "Lisp" and "pebble" have identical emotional affect. So consequently a small core of Lispers can flood the front page, or, as the ratio of fans to bashers shifts, they can be crowded into obscurity even on the programming page. The small group leads the large group because, in regard of that topic, the large group is as happy with as without.
That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!
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He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed.
I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
"He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system."
So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
No one's disputing that. What's broken about the naive implementation of social news is the degree to which a small group of true believers can take it over.
You'll have seen this before with Lisp on Reddit. Some people always upvote, some people always downvote, some people downvote because they're tired of seeing it, and the vast, vast majority simply have no opinion. To them, the words "Lisp" and "pebble" have identical emotional affect. So consequently a small core of Lispers can flood the front page, or, as the ratio of fans to bashers shifts, they can be crowded into obscurity even on the programming page. The small group leads the large group because, in regard of that topic, the large group is as happy with as without.
That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!