It would be nice to have some way of adding tags to the information, so that we could specify what information we need, and avoid the rest. Unfortunately, this would not work, because the tagging would be costly, and there would be incentives to tag incorrectly.
For example, I like to be connected with people I like on Facebook. I just don’t have to be informed about every time they farted. So I would prefer if some information would be labeled as “important” for the given person, and I would only read those. But that would only give me many links to youtube videos labeled “important”; and even this assumes too optimistically that people would bother to use the tags.
I missed my high-school reunion once because a Facebook group started specifically to notify people about the reunion gradually became a place for idle chat. After a few months of stupid content I learned to ignore the group. And then I missed a short message which was exceptionally on-topic. There was nothing to make it stand out of the rest.
In groups related to one specific goal, a solution could be to mark some messages as “important” and to make the importance a scarce resource. Something like: you can only label one message in a week as important. But even this would be subject to games, such as “this message is obviously important, so someone else is guaranteed to spend their point on it, so I will keep my point for something else”.
The proper solution would probably use some personal recommendation system. Such as: there is an information, users can add their labels, and you can decide to “follow” some users which means that you will see what they labeled. Maybe something like Digg, but you would see only the points that your friends gave to the articles. You could have different groups of friends for different filters.
It would be nice to have some way of adding tags to the information, so that we could specify what information we need, and avoid the rest. Unfortunately, this would not work, because the tagging would be costly, and there would be incentives to tag incorrectly.
For example, I like to be connected with people I like on Facebook. I just don’t have to be informed about every time they farted. So I would prefer if some information would be labeled as “important” for the given person, and I would only read those. But that would only give me many links to youtube videos labeled “important”; and even this assumes too optimistically that people would bother to use the tags.
I missed my high-school reunion once because a Facebook group started specifically to notify people about the reunion gradually became a place for idle chat. After a few months of stupid content I learned to ignore the group. And then I missed a short message which was exceptionally on-topic. There was nothing to make it stand out of the rest.
In groups related to one specific goal, a solution could be to mark some messages as “important” and to make the importance a scarce resource. Something like: you can only label one message in a week as important. But even this would be subject to games, such as “this message is obviously important, so someone else is guaranteed to spend their point on it, so I will keep my point for something else”.
The proper solution would probably use some personal recommendation system. Such as: there is an information, users can add their labels, and you can decide to “follow” some users which means that you will see what they labeled. Maybe something like Digg, but you would see only the points that your friends gave to the articles. You could have different groups of friends for different filters.
SEO is the devil.