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cory doctorow
with discussion, griping, and gaming
on the moderation system
itself
. The core task of Slashdot has
become
editorship, not the pu-
tative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of
Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness
in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you
had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery
in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and com-
mented upon. You’d be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of
person that is sometimes referred to as a “slashdork.”
As radical as Yahoo!’s conceit was, Slashdot’s was more radical.
But as radical as Slashdot’s is, it is still inherently conservative in
that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further
requires human judgment and intervention.
Google’s a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algo-
rithm. Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search
engines like AltaVista, in which laughably bad artificial intelli-
gence engines attempted to automatically understand the con-
tent, context, and value of every page on the Web so that a search
for “Dog” would turn up the page more relevant to the query.
Google’s algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are
good at understanding things and computers are good at count-
ing things. Google counts up all the links on the Web and affords
more authority to those pages that have been linked to by the
most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has been linked
to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit
in that page. This system works remarkably well — so well that
it’s nearly inconceivable that any search-engine would order its
rankings by any other means. What’s more, it doesn’t pervert
the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by turning
each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn:
Or at least, it
didn’t.
Today, dedicated web-writers, such as blog-
gers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their
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