Dumping the vote

For the past six months I have been running over the same scenario repeatedly in my head. In essence, it involves the death of voting on social bookmarking sites. The problem is, it gives birth to nothing. At least in my world that is the end result, and I have not an ounce of research to back up the hypothesis. Albeit a risky maneuver, I figure I might as well reinforce my outlandish claims, and be the first to officially dump the vote.

If you expect to uncover a well constructed criticism of voting models, then let me save you some time. You will not find it here. The critique of this content delivery filtering mechanism has been explored far and wide already. All I have to offer is the highly anticipated justification that it simply does not work. The knowledge that is most useful, most interesting, and most thought-provoking to me, does not exist on these Web sites.

I have nothing to gain by pushing for this sweeping reform. The reality is that the majority of the traffic I have ever received has been the result of social bookmarking. I do not deny that there are benefits to content publishers, and that a solid advertising model can be built around submission to these services. However, the primary intended purpose, once altruistic, is now a festering boil in need of a doctor’s lance.

Like so many before me, I do not have the answer to the problem, but I do have an opinion. Again, let me save you some time. It is not the Semantic Web. I still cringe at this vague attempt to organize so much information into a pseudo artificial intelligence. However, the primary benefit of what the Semantic Web promises is exactly what I envision as the next revolution in information discovery and filtering on the Internet.

The next golden ticket will be search assistants that track search history, search preferences, RSS feeds, emails, music preferences, and purchases, and then bring me relevant knowledge as a result of my online behavioral patterns. It sounds like science fiction, and a security nightmare. Yet, this deep level of personalization will help people to discover hidden information that is deemed important by their standard, not standards defined by the populous.

So what exactly does it mean to dump the vote? Not a single vote will ever be cast by me again on Digg, Reddit, DZone, Hacker News, Mixx, Propeller, or any other social bookmarking Web site. DZone may be the only site that creeps into my RSS reader, but overall, I will be shunning any network that plays the voting game. Mock as you might — I will not be the one to vote up your retort.

• Posted by Brian
• June 7th, 2008