Digital commons don't get better with more use, at least not by default.
- Digital commons don't get better with more use[ahl], at least not by default.
- They just get more active.
- More investment of energy from the community.
- But by default that more investment creates cacophonous oversupply.
- Funnily enough, this is exactly the opposite of how physical commons degrade.
- As there's more and more stuff, it gets harder to find the good stuff.
- For a digital commons to get better with more activity, it has to have some kind of sense-making apparatus, a quality pump.
- The quality pump is the sorting process, so that more activity helps select the better stuff automatically.
- In Wikipedia, this is the fact that there's a single shared namespace.
- There is only one article named "Barack Obama," and the community has to come to a competitive consensus on what it should say to all visitors.
- There is a natural sorting process as the tug of war ends up on a maxima.
- In YouTube, there is a proprietary ranking algorithm for recommendations and search results.
- When you have a quality pump, more content doesn't drown out good content.
- More content at the bottom of the quality gradient is rarely seen anyway.
- The high-quality stuff floats to the top.
- You keep the best visible, and the worst–perhaps a near-infinite cesspool–stays below the fold, rarely seen by anyone.
- With these quality pumps, you want some way to detect if new content is good[aho].
- If all new content goes straight to the bottom, it will never be seen by anyone, and you won't know if it's any good.
- Whereas if new content is shown to a few random people, and you see how they like it–is it good or bad–it can start floating up or down the quality gradient instead of languishing.
- The main meta property of a good quality pump: more activity makes it sort better.
- A good quality pump gives you upside if the new content is great, but capped downside if it's not, because few people will ever see it.