Web 2.0 needs User Experience 101

Or Why Early Adopters are Ruining Social Networks

Lately I've been looking into services such as Digg.com and Reddit.com and del.icio.us

While all of these services offer the compelling concept of community ranking and tagging of links... it doesn't take long to realise that they are becoming overwhelmingly dominated by geek culture (or "pwned" by the "l33t" users) -- the early adopters.

The danger of this, is that many groundbreaking innovations may alienate the mainstream public.

Take for example the most popular tags in del.icio.us. One look at the homepage reveals terms like Ajax, CSS, Blog, Programming, Software, etc. In fact, 55/120 (46%) tags were directly related to technology, or the internet. With Knitting standing out as the only decidedly non-geek related tag.

Compare this to Amazon.com's Top selling non-fiction books and you get a very different view of the collective interests of netizens. It's far more varied in its content, covering a broad range of topics, with historical, economic, and political themes predominating.

Here's a thought experiment -- imagine that John is someone who has spent all his time reading and mastering the material found at the top of del.icio.us, and Sally is someone who has spent all of her time reading and mastering the top selling books on Amazon.com. Who would you rather invite to your dinner party?

Another dangerous trend among these community ranking websites is the dominance of the early adopter community. Being able to understand an innovation quickly, this is naturally your internet/tech savvy crowd (I count myself among them) -- however, there is a negative tendency in this community to attack outsiders and n00bies.

If a well-meaning newcomer to Digg.com, decided to quickly submit a story which accidentally duplicated a pre-existing story, or was on a subject that had been over-hyped and people were tired of reading about -- they could find their post flooded with negative comments.

Even in my own experience, when getting started with Digg one of my posts was greeted by "Go spam somewhere else tard" -- by someone who obviously made snap judgment without looking at the post itself. (My post was a parody of the many Million-Dollar website links that kept cropping up.)

Similarly, make an unpopular submission to Reddit, and you'll slowly watch it sink into negative ranking.

The promise of social network ranking systems is a quality filter, a noise gate, for the million-channel broadcast of the internet -- in practice, it is also filtering out diversity of thought and encouraging submissions that play to the incumbent audience.

The is no simple solution to this, but I believe the service that will succeed is the service that doesn't look for bastardised forms of game theory to model a ranking system -- it will be the service that goes back to good ol' User Experience basics and begins to understand how people want their information to be filtered and prioritised.

Just because we're building Web 2.0 doesn't mean we throw away the lessons from Web 1.0.