Pluricide and Power Laws

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I've been interested recently in the relationship between inequality and pluralism.

My default assumptions are these:

Pluralism -- the peaceful co-existence of many diverse forms -- is good.
Equality -- the sharing of resources and rewards throughout a system -- is good.

These are familiar ideas, derived from Darwin and Marx. But it seems clear that equality and pluralism, though 'good', are not increasing in the world today, and that one does not necessarily lead to the other.

Recently I published on my website some rather rambling notes towards an essay called Pluricide. This text bemoaned monoculture, conformity and the erasure of different ways of doing things. One thought in the essay -- based partly on my own experience of record labels, which tend to focus all their resources on a handful of big selling artists rather than spreading them evenly -- was this:

'Any alternative which is not becoming 'the correct' is slowly dying. The zone between 'the correct' and 'the wrong' is an uneasy place. There is no stability there. You cannot, for instance, keep your independent record label between hits and misses for too long. (And do not think that you can finance your misses with your hits. Look at Mute.) Between winning and dying there is not much space, and even less time to waver.'

Now I've found a technical term from network theory to describe this phenomenon: Power Laws. The term comes from an interesting essay by Clay Shirky called Power Laws, Web Logs, and Inequality. Relating Power Laws to ideas like 'the 80/20 rule' and the 'winner takes all society', Shirky says:

'For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a "predictable imbalance", with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth . The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern, with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous). Jacob Nielsen observed power law distributions in web site page views , and so on.'

This also applies to blogs, with the top 12% of blogs hogging 50% of inbound links. Shirky says this happens because 'power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.'

In a section called 'freedom of choice makes stars inevitable', Shirky outlines a model he thinks is wrong. In fact, it's very much the model I outlined as an ideal corollory of digital distribtion in my 1991 essay 'Pop Stars Nein Danke!', summed up in the aphorism 'In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people'. Shirky describes the same scenario like this:

'Consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their 10 favorite blogs. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each blog. This distribution would be basically flat - most blogs will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few blogs will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the blogs will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the writing nor other people's choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.'

But this is not how things work in the real world, says Shirky. Without calling it anything so judgemental, he describes something I'd probably call 'conformity' (and others might call 'the tipping point'):

'But people's choices do affect one another. If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.

Think of this positive feedback as a preference premium. The system assumes that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users; the thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will rather be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the system previously.'

Shirky adds:

'Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.'

(It occurs to me that ILX threads also work this way. There is a feeding frenzy on some threads, which becomes a snowball effect. Finally, the big, popular threads collapse under their own weight, like supernovae.)

Now, I find this rather persuasive as an explanation of why my 'famous for 15 people' world has not arrived, despite the flattened playing field of digital distribution. It's all down to Power Laws, innit! Of course, both my inner socialist and my inner pluralist are wailing and gnashing their teeth, asking about sustainability and ethics and quality and, yes, pluricide. This just confirms their worst fears, even if Shirky points out that unequal doesn't necessarily mean unfair.

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 03:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Your thoughts?

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 03:57 (twenty-two years ago)

also note that big, popular threads are often the result of one or two posters flooding the channel, not actually because everybody is interested in the discussion and puts their two cents in. Just a point.

― TOMBOT, Thursday, 18 December 2003 04:05 (twenty-two years ago)

Is Shirky basically just applying systems theory jargon to ideas like 'the lowest common denominator' and 'nothing succeeds like success'?

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 04:17 (twenty-two years ago)

Actually yeah, I would say so. It's all true, though. This is why the arts need grants. Frankly it's also interesting to consider that often the 20% that holds the 80% of wealth are also the people who fund a lot of the fringe ventures you're speaking of.

― TOMBOT, Thursday, 18 December 2003 04:21 (twenty-two years ago)

(Or just saying 'all systems are entropic,' and all records are sedimentary?)

― ermes marana, Thursday, 18 December 2003 04:24 (twenty-two years ago)

often the 20% that holds the 80% of wealth are also the people who fund a lot of the fringe ventures you're speaking of.

I refer to the precariousness of that form of subsidy with the example of Mute Records, though. It's true that for 20 years Mute managed never to drop (legend has it) a single artist, no matter how unsuccessful, financing all the Fad Gadget and Holger Hiller failures with the Depeche Mode and Erasure hits. But

a) This is not normally the way of business, which drops 'failed products' fast.
b) Seen at closer range, Mute -- and the indie distribution system in Britain -- was in permanent crisis.
c) In the end, Mute sold out to EMI and the low sellers were dropped.

What I call the 'flicker state' -- neither off nor on, neither failure nor success -- seems to be the hardest to maintain.

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 04:31 (twenty-two years ago)

This also applies to blogs, with the top 12% of blogs hogging 50% of inbound links

I'm thinking that search engines like Google only encourage this sort of phenomenon by giving more weight to a site's popularity than the actual relevance to keywords typed in by the user. Assuming that most people will only click on a link within a first page of search results, this means that, yeah, that curve you mentioned will probably keep getting steeper and steeper.

― may pang (maypang), Thursday, 18 December 2003 05:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group).

Also note that even with as little as a thousand blogs, popular blogs will succeed because they have more chance of ever been seen by a random newcomer.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 18 December 2003 09:50 (twenty-two years ago)

The number one way for a blog to get inbound links is to have lots of outbound links.

― Tico Tico (Tico Tico), Thursday, 18 December 2003 10:56 (twenty-two years ago)

I may have been a bit harsh on my aphorism about everyone being famous for fifteen people. Power Laws do not essentially contradict it. In fact, it may be quite a good description of the 80% of blogs being read by a handful of people. All we'd really have to change would be the 'everyone' bit (and of course the 'future' bit, because this is happening now). It would fit the Power Laws scenario if we said instead 'Now, a few people are massive stars. Everyone else is famous for fifteen people.'

Unfortnately this completely undermines the radical utopian, egalitarian flavour of my original aphorism, and the Warhol aphorism it was based on ('famous for fifteen minutes'). Now we're back, despite the level playing field of digital distribution, to a world remarkably like the old one of traditional broadcast media: a world in which there are a few professionals and a lot of amateurs, a few profit-makers and a lot of loss-makers, a mainstream and an alternative, stars and the rest.

What has changed with digital distribution is that things change faster than before, I think. And the entire field is wider. Instead of a few 'speaking' people and many mute, 'watching' people, we have everyone speaking. Sure, attention clusters massively round the top few blogs, but if they don't change daily, stay interesting and stay hot, they can be forgotten quickly. I'd say that the 15 people-type blogs are less subject to trends, to dramatic reversals in fortune. The same little circle of friends will read each other's blogs forever.

So perhaps we should go back to Warhol's emphasis on time, the 15 minutes line, and bring it back into the aphorism thus: 'Now, a few people are massive stars for fifteen minutes. Everyone else is famous for fifteen people... forever.'

This brings a kind of poetic justice back into the picture, and satisfies our desire to see some sort of equality re-established. Look, the tortoise beats the hare in the end!

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 12:43 (twenty-two years ago)

NOT IN MY NAME!

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 18 December 2003 12:46 (twenty-two years ago)

(Or is this just the digital equivalent of saying 'There are stars, and then there's Dave, who will always be a star to his mum'?)

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 12:49 (twenty-two years ago)

We haven't really looked at the 'pluricide' part yet. Is there real variety, with all those bloggers out there, all those guys with their home recording studios? Have you seen a lot of really different takes on what a blog might be, or a lot of variants on one basic model? When you run a record label, one thing you notice is how many demos are just variants on existing formulas. Maybe McLuhan was right about the medium being the message. There is ideology of mp3, an ideology of MTV, an ideology of VHS, an ideology of blogging which makes people all do basically the same thing with each new technology as it comes along (I would also mention conformity and unoriginality here, just because I'm Scottish and moralistic!). People are, in a sense, taken over by these new technologies, these crazes. Like pet owners or new parents, they all play with their 'dependents' in remarkably similar ways. While believing themselves to be free and dominant, they are actually dominated by their pets, babies, and blogs. It's like a host-parasite relationship.

So one reason everyone might be clustering around a few blogs is that there is only one correct way to blog, and someone 'got it right'. Why read the copies when you can read 'the one', the 'it-blog'?

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 13:07 (twenty-two years ago)

(And now I see this few-many curve, with its left-end cluster, not just as the shape of the conflict between the government and Microsoft, Marx and Adam Smith, but also that of the conflict between Epicurus and Plato, between animist polytheism and Judeo-Christian monotheism. I go every time with the people who want to level out that cluster: with the feds v Microsoft, with Marx, with Epicurus, with animism.)

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 13:20 (twenty-two years ago)

The basic shape of the Power Law curve, with its left-end cluster and long, flat tail:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw/figure2.gif

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 13:25 (twenty-two years ago)

There is ideology of mp3, an ideology of MTV, an ideology of VHS, an ideology of blogging which makes people all do basically the same thing with each new technology as it comes along (I would also mention conformity and unoriginality here, just because I'm Scottish and moralistic!).

Of course, it's possible that there's a conformist ideology of originality too. You see it in the 1960s, a lemming-like rush towards the avant garde, backed up by a pseudo-psychiatric 'creativity literature'. In the late 60s, for instance, you get a small number of enormously successful groups -- Beatles, Beach Boys, Floyd -- 'representing diversity' in their music by integrating avant garde elements, ethnic elements, while never quite handing over power to Ravi Shankar or Fluxus entirely, or directing people out into the wilderness of 'the other'. In fact it's hard to know how they could have 'handed over power' and destroyed their own cluster spikes on the power law curve. I guess the Beatles did all they could. They split up, Lennon married a Fluxus artist and started singing 'power to the people'. He tried!

Shirky describes the difficulty of smashing the cluster spike:

'Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link others, which would require both global oversight and the application of force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to save it.'

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 14:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Power laws also apply to this thread. The reason most of the posts are by me is that this thread is way to the right on the Power Laws curve. The thread is not being visited very often. This is partly because I made a rather obscure title, a too-long introductory question, and made reading two rather difficult essays a semi-requirement of participating, when most people are at work and can't spare that amount of attention. The 'spike thread' or 'it thread' on ILE right now is 'This is the thread where I say...', a 'phatic' thread in which people just chat about whatever. (Oops is saying 'Well, this is the only thread I've read today. Which ones should I avoid?')

Although this thread is having little impact and will surely never be a 'spike thread' or 'it thread', it does have a strong identity. In fact, the less it is visited by people, the stronger its identity will be, the more it will remain distinct and focused. Imagine a 'here comes everybody' scenario in which a mass influx of regulars arrives on this thread. Soon it begins to resemble every other ILE thread. There are complaints about stress at work, friendly banter, pictures of kittens. It loses in particularity what it gains in popularity.

And I think this tells us that threads which maintain distinct identities can add value to the system overall, even when nobody actually wants to visit them, in much the same way as I might be pleased to live in a city where avant garde theatre productions happen, even if I never actually go to one, or might be happy that people all over the world have telephones, even if I only call five friends, or might want a train system to extend to small towns, even if I only go between big cities. The inherent value of a system is enhanced -- disproportionately to their use value -- by its most unpopular elements... as long as they are not simply failed carbon copies of the most popular elements. This is a 'systems theory' argument for originality and diversity.

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 14:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Momus I'm visiting this thread regularly but I don't have too much to add because most of it seems like a lot of analysis of a fairly obvious truism about social networks and I don't have any 'comment hooks' as yet. I am enjoying it though so please keep going!

― Tico Tico (Tico Tico), Thursday, 18 December 2003 15:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Actually yes I do. I'm not convinced by your linkage of culture spikes with a crushing of pluralism - for that I'd need to think that the top-tier blogs (say) were actively engaged in trying to squash or discourage smaller blogs. I think that does clearly happen in some power systems - grocery retail springs to mind - but not in the 'blogosphere'.

― Tico Tico (Tico Tico), Thursday, 18 December 2003 15:02 (twenty-two years ago)

I think the problem is that people, consciously or subliminally, integrate the both the inherent guidelines of the format -- the 'ideology of the blog' -- and the personality of the top blogs into their idea of what a blog is supposed to be, the Platonic Form of the blog. They 'blog', in other words, rather than doing things that just happen to fit the blogware. They could do anything, and create a truly pluralistic blogscape. But instead what you get is major inequality in popularity -- the Power Law curve -- but far less inequality of style (ie diversity).

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 15:20 (twenty-two years ago)

And then the blog consumer sort of goes, 'Given the choice between two identical blogs, one of which is massively popular and the other almost unread, I'll choose the popular one.' It's the 'ten million flies can't be wrong' syndrome, and it's quite an understandable reaction to the lack of diversity. An alternative strategy is 'I'm going to search and search until I find something different out there, and if I don't find it I'll make it, by God!' But that obviously requires a lot more effort and will.

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 15:26 (twenty-two years ago)

It also requires an 'ideology' in which diversity and pluralism -- and possibly also equality -- are important elements, and I'm not sure we're living in that sort of world right now. That sort of ideology was much more prevalent in the 60s and 90s.

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 15:29 (twenty-two years ago)

In other words, this relates to monoculture. It suggests that monoculture is something inside us, deep in what Pierre Bourdieu would call our habitus. We don't have to eat at McDonald's or use a Microsoft computer. But perhaps in troubled times there is comfort in conformity.

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 18 December 2003 15:35 (twenty-two years ago)

exactly, 9-11 pushed everyone back into the comfort-zone sonically, hopefully the masses will grow back into a search mode, not just seeking a familar sound, or a friend's blog and ultimately a re-definition of "equality".

― Vacillating temp (Vacillating temp), Thursday, 18 December 2003 17:55 (twenty-two years ago)

i speaketh the obvious

― Vacillating temp (Vacillating temp), Thursday, 18 December 2003 18:17 (twenty-two years ago)

But Shirky's theory is based on blog data, right? Can you apply it to other forms of culture? I can't even touch this stuff without spinning off into the argument over whether the diarist is really an "artist" -- or whether he isn't at best an artist of the lowest order, being rawly self-focused -- or whether the bearable diarist is actually the greatest of creators, finding gold in a near-barren mine...

Do power laws work the same way for blogs -- where the material (microdata?) used to form the cultural objects (macrodata?) is essentially random -- as they do for novels and albums? Or do extremely high-quality new examples of more deliberately constructed, planned art forms stand a better chance than The Navel-Presentation Tricks of the New Kids on the (PLEASE QUIT BEATING ME, PUN POLICE!) Blog? Has blog data shown an abnormal tendency to pluricide?

If there's no difference, get a net, cuz I'm jumping off a bridge.

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Thursday, 18 December 2003 22:57 (twenty-two years ago)

But Shirky's theory is based on blog data, right? Can you apply it to other forms of culture?

I think it's a model that looks at popularity, ie at reception of cultural products. It doesn't distinguish art from non-art. Shirky says the 'winner takes all' distribution cluster has been observed in wealth distribution, in linguistic distribution (although it's hard to see the word 'the' as a 'winner'), and in web page view data.

Shirky (wisely) avoids getting into lit crit. But quality is not excluded as a possible explanation for success:

'Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality)'...

Now, this is where I take things further than Shirky (because I'm Scottish and judgemental, etc). Shirky notes that the big gap is between the number one rated product (the chart topper spiking the spike) and the rest. I'd say this is because the number one product, by accident or design, has managed to be both paradigmatic and typical; to incarnate the 'one right way' to do things. It is norm-defining -- 'exceptionally normal' or (in my favourite Susan Sontag phrase) 'aggressively normal', but also norm-exceeding, abnormal.

And here we come to the 'Jenny from the block' syndrome, the 'keepin it real' paradox: any product riding that big spike, so far from the median, cannot be 'normal'. Its appeal is based on a transmutation of the normal, a reification of the normal, an elevation and even deification of the normal. Some of us might wish to see that big spike, that pedestal, occupied by a Tolstoy, a Shakespeare, a Goethe -- people acknowledged to be exceptional, occupying an exceptional position.

But we live in a culture as uncomfortable with the idea of inequalities of talent as it is comfortable with the idea of material inequalities. J-Lo can be forgiven for being much richer than us because she is 'still us' -- that is, she is 'us' magically mutated and transformed by wealth, celebrity, and cosmetic surgery.

Try reversing the statement she makes in that song, though, by switching the material and the immaterial goods: what if J-Lo were telling us not to be fooled by the PhD in Literary Criticism she got (which had made her a very different person from the girl we once knew 'on the block'), because she still in fact has no money and an empty jewel box. This would make us uneasy. The top-selling, spike-riding winner would be proclaiming herself both qualitatively and quantitively exceptional. To follow her example, we would have to work not just on our bank accounts, but on our minds and souls. We would have to be spiritually aspirational in a way our culture hasn't really mainstreamed since the Beatles visited the maharishi. So I think it's fair to say that J-Lo would tumble off the spike the moment she said anything like that. I may be wrong. Maybe Eminem is seen as a genius.

The literary world is an odd case, because it has traditionally been a business with a pluralistic model -- you keep a variety of books in print even if they don't sell a lot, as a kind of public service -- and a strong commitment to 'excellence' -- in other words, to the celebration of the original, the exceptionally exceptional rather than the exceptionally normal.

And yet recently publishing has become more and more dominated by marketing and the need to get its products over the 'tipping point' and up on the spike. So it's having to play the game I call 'normal is the new special'. In other words, it's sliding from an emphasis on the exceptionally exceptional to an emphasis on the exceptionally normal. Better get that net ready, Ann!

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 01:27 (twenty-two years ago)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEplopglub.

Before I go --

I hate to poke another stick in the Eggers crew's dirty cage, but I think the only one who can save us now is the Better Breed o' Critic.

I don't mean part-timers like me. Sure, I try to be responsible, and I do love my subjects, but I admittedly write criticism of books and music in large part because I have to make a living. I spend too much time, hours a real critic would spend researching, to work on my own primary texts. We need help from people whose genuine vocation and full-time occupation is to sift and winnow.

Too bad we've got people like the "Believer" crew out there, sitting up near the crest of the spike and holding up "the critical critic" as this Oilcan Harry that no good little fan should ever dream of wanting to grow up to be...

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Friday, 19 December 2003 03:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Upthread I found a way to bring equality back into the picture -- by adding the time dimension and saying that perhaps the disproportionately famous may be around for less time than the unsung, and that the tortoise may beat the hare.

Here's a way to bring pluralism back in. Think of one chart, showing the characteristic unevenly skewed Power Law distribution. It shows a feeding frenzy, a concensus, a picture of organic inequality. But think of a plethora of charts, all showing slightly different things; web page hits, blog inward links, most-downloaded mp3s, most streamed web radio... They are all experiences a surfer can have with digital data of one sort or another. They each have a specific ideology attached, a history: web radio copies, with a different distribution system, a media form born in the 1920s. mp3 is the gramophone record, digitally scrambled and wanting to be free. Blogs are diaries that reach out to other diaries, and so on. Each has a style, each has hit which hog the higher reaches of their ratings charts. On each individual chart there is a danger of monopoly. But if we stop comparing like with like, the picture changes. (Linguists would call what I'm proposing a switch from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic -- from a list of similar, competing elements, like nouns, to a family of different elements which function together, like a sentence.) If we look from the surfer's point of view, there is simply a plethora of stimulae confronting him. He hits a blog, an mp3, a stream... The fact that the blog is popular or not concerns him little, because he's not comparing it to other blogs, but to the different media forms he's encountering on his travels. You could track his transversal path across the Power Law curves: first he hits a very popular blog, then a rather unpopular mp3... In fact, if he's surfing somewhat randomly, surely the long righthand tail of the Power Law curve makes him more likely to encounter unpopular than popular items, since there are a lot more of them out there waiting to trip him up. While linkage will certainly exert a sort of gravitational pull towards the spikes, their very thinness will make them easy to miss. The fact that a lot of people are on an ILX thread is of little consequence to the surfer who lands on it because of some semi-accidental Google result.

What looks like a self-organising system in which winners win massively turns into a somewhat different model, chaotic, accidental, fortuitous and highly pluralistic. What the surfer experiences is stimulus, chaos, plethora, entropy, the random. I'd say about half of my own surfing -- and perhaps of my record buying -- is of this type. It's based on incidentals: I buy a record for the sleeve, I read a site I've hit while doing an image search for a tree bark texture and find myself intrigued.

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 03:25 (twenty-two years ago)

(Crossposted with yours, Ann...)

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 03:25 (twenty-two years ago)

(Heh heh, while reading yours I was thinking "Yeah, and who IS going to remember Eggers in 100 years, anyway? BACK AWAY FROM THE LEDGE, STERZINGER!")

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Friday, 19 December 2003 03:36 (twenty-two years ago)

This is an interesting essay about the same stuff, talking more about 'social software' like Friendster. This network theory stuff is hot. In fact, you could say that electronically-mediated social networks have become the persuasive metaphor of our time, as computers themselves were before them, and as the road system, world exploration, and religion might have been to previous ages.

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 03:50 (twenty-two years ago)

To stick with the blog end of the discussion, how would contentiousness-for contentiousness's-sake and "no such thing as bad publicity" figure in? (The metaphoric 'troll,' I suppose.) As in, how much of Bill O'Reilly's audience hates him? How many tune in specifically to hate him? How does this snowball among fans and haters alike?

― ermes marana, Friday, 19 December 2003 03:59 (twenty-two years ago)

(or, 'nothing persuades like the completely unpersuasive')

― ermes marana, Friday, 19 December 2003 04:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Ermes, I was going to say earlier, when talking about how even unpopular, neglected or unsed elements add value to the system as a whole, that trolls also add value to the online communities they frequent. I think their value is in breaking the redundancy patterns of phatic information which can threaten to clog the communities otherwise (like the 'This is the thread where I say...' thread, ha ha!). I suppose a formula could be reached to assess a troll's value:

(amount of clogging of fresh information flow due to troll) minus (amount of declogging of redundant phatics due to troll) = value to community of troll

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 04:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Whoops, that should of course read:

declogging minus clogging = value

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 04:39 (twenty-two years ago)

The reason trolls are necessary is that people have a tendency to think that when a community is agreeing and empathising it's functioning well. That might be the case, but agreement might also be based on redundancy -- the fact that no new information is entering the loop. Of course, disagreement can also become highly redundant, which is when the troll becomes tedious.

― Momus (Momus), Friday, 19 December 2003 04:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Which is why the smart troll, having secured his bridge, takes a breather and sews himself some dance pants.

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Friday, 19 December 2003 04:52 (twenty-two years ago)

I thought this thread was going to be about killing ravers

― nate detritus (natedetritus), Friday, 19 December 2003 06:29 (twenty-two years ago)

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