Ameritocracy

» Politics in Social Networking: Ameritocracy

I’m so glad to see this post, because its one of our early organic posts and although its fairly balanced, Leslie Poston is overall doubtful about Ameritocracy. As said below, this is awesome, I want people thinking critically about the site and its definition of success. At the same time, I’d like to reply.

Leslie says: “When anyone can submit any bastardized quote and claim anyone said it under the guise of ‘finding the truth’, that’s a recipe for trouble. Alternatively, someone can put up a real quote and a troll can challenge it.”

In both cases (which basically amount to people adding junk or misleading content), there are built-in tools to help the Ameritocracy community overcome bad information. All content (except comments) must be cited. From there, misquotes can be flagged and bad or junk content can be rated down.

There are many ways to game a system like Ameritocracy, but we’re banking on the dedication of the hard core 1% of the community to police this stuff. It works on Wikipedia vastly more often than it fails to work.

No system is perfect - particularly on the internet, but also in real life. The only other option (which might perhaps please Leslie? I’m not sure.) is to have a board of 5 highly trustworthy, highly credible, highly knowledgeable people factchecking - which is exactly what we don’t want. If we all get our reliable news from just a few people, there are simply too many chances for those people to abuse their position (and many do).

It’s true that an open and user-generated system like Ameritocracy is more prone to gaming than a closed and controlled system. However, I’d much rather participate in a system where I have to sort through some of the crap, than in one where its shoved down my throat.

{ Iris* }