blackrimglasses

Digg, the echo chamber and Matthew » mathewingram.com/work: uh… the law of cumulative advantage is also known as power-law and also a result of scale-free networks in terms of connectionist theory. Its not really new, per se. Its also called flocking behavior. You can witness this behavior in malls. Amazon tries to mimic this behavior through collaborative filtering. Here is the problem: cumulative advantage renders what should be probabilistic systems deterministic by the very nature of the crowd’s behavior. As time goes on, this behavior gets worse and worse until something with an intrinsic aim of being probabilistic and “by the crowd for the crowd” ends up being worse than deterministic systems they are trying not to become. I refer of course to the concept of “social news,” which, if you read digg as of late, has become less and less relevant. But the funny thing is: this had to have been expected.