The ignorance of Crowds…

I’m as big of a fan of social media as anyone you’ll meet… but the Diggiots have gone too far. Business 2.0 has an online poll of “Who matters now?” With the tag:

Business 2.0 Magazine invites you to vote for the businesspeople who inspire, inform and infuriate you, from CEOs to entrepreneurs to media stars.

I keep Digg’s top headlines in RSS on my homepage and once in a while I click through - that’s how I found out about the story. Good that’s the Digg purpose - to deliver news that is interesting. What shouldn’t happen is what has happened to the results of this poll. When I saw it earlier Kevin Rose - founder of Digg (who has 3x the number of ratings of anyone else on the list) - was #2 on the list behind only Justin Kan - the kid who wears a video camera 24/7 - and dead last was Jason Calacanis - an entrepreneur that I may not always agree with, but one that is as important in the web arena as Kevin Rose if not more so. So - here we have a serious magazine attempting to intelligently use the democratic/social aspects of the web and ending up with a list that was built out of ignorance and immaturity.

What does this mean? I think it’s bad for social media. The more social media appears to be gamed the less likely it is to be adopted and respected by a larger audience. Sure, social media has gotten a lot more respect as of late… but how many contests does Kevin Rose have to win before people decide they can no longer use the web as a method of obtaining objective results.

Gaming is something I think about a lot. Mainly in terms of pattern recognition and how to slow things down or stop them. Others take a more lax approach - knowing that if they let people game their sites they’ll keep coming back. It’s a tough choice to make and one that may ultimately determine how social media is viewed.