The Early Vote
rzwitserloot posted in politics on March 19th, 2006

I’ve noticed an interesting and disturbing side-effect of today’s connected society:

Early votes have significantly more impact compared to later votes, sometimes exponentially so.

‘votes’, here, applies to almost anything. Reviews, popularity, memes, political parties, blog articles, etcetera.

This hypothesis is a bit hard to prove, but I’ll try anyway.

On ‘aggregator’ websites such as reddit.com and digg.com, users ‘vote’ on submitted articles, and those articles with the most votes get displayed on the front page.

Because people tend to want to watch high-rated articles, entries with higher ratings see more traffic. Assuming that the article is not a complete turd, on average each view generates a slight positive change, resulting in the whole thing spiralling out of control fast.

In other words, early votes cause more votes, which cause more votes, etcetera, making those early votes pivotal.

This very trick was used in a stock market manipulation scam recently.

Full story (if you already know it, feel free to skip on to the horizontal divider):

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Check out the ratings of articles on reddit and especially digg (note that the ‘this article is under review’ banner has appeared only weeks after the initial storm of diggs).

Interestingly, the digg item on the scam, here, has only 650 diggs; less than half of what the original article has. Still overwhelming and more than enough to make front-page, though.

The short story here: 6 people worked together to get the article 6 quick diggs. The apparent legitimacy that these initial votes imply combined with pushing the right buttons (digg sheeple are known to vote anything with ‘google’ in it up) combines to launch this story into stardom.

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Similar negative effects can also be observed - post an item at the wrong time, and receive some early negative votes, and the article drops off the radar, never to be seen again, regardless of quality. At least reddit is trying to do something about it.

These trends aren’t unique to reddit or digg, though they are most striking there because they can be quantified somewhat.

The year 2000 craze back in the late 90s, and currently, the peak oil theory are showing up all over the place.

Peak oil has been around for decades, and aside from its introduction, it has never ever correctly predicted the oil price. Not even close. From time to time, however, peak oil surges, makes it into major papers, and even otherwise sane people write blogs about it. Not to say that such people drink that koolaid, but the point is - lots of people are devoting attention to this issue, linking to each other for legitimacy.

Clearly, attention garners more attention. A vicious spiral.

That’s not all though; not only attention is controlled by the early vote - legitimacy is another area which relies on that crucial early vote.

Reputable news organizations and the lights of the blogging community do not normally blindly post every rumour they hear. They research. Unfortunately, research is becoming more and more difficult. Crafting fake news is easier than ever. The average internet user I confront about such things tends to believe that google news, wikipedia, digg, reddit, slashdot, and just about any other popular site is a reputable source of news, yet time and time again they fall for fake news. Even mainstream media have often been the butt end of practical jokes. You could try spending a lot of time, money and effort being extremely diligent in chasing down your news links, but apparently no one cares, and in this age of soundbytes and instant gratification, if you aren’t as good as the other guy, you wither away into oblivion. the only site I really know of that is popular in its community yet has a great diligence record is think secret, a site dedicated to rumours surrounding apple.

In short - once a story seems initially legit, the blogosphere, the aggregator world, and the entire news world in general will automatically turn it into a major story for you.

A spectacular breakdown of the notion that crowds are smart, in other words (The author of the book linked does explain that independent review works best, but so far few seem to get that).

The lesson here? When you vie for the attention of the world, make sure you’ve got a bunch of cronies lined up to evangelise the heck out of your product, preferably all at the same time, for about a day. Then just sit back, relax, and bake in the spotlight.

Of course, with some luck at some point people will wise up to this and develop a strong sense of skepticism. Here’s to it!