Social Media and the Echo Chamber

With the rise of social media and social networking sites we have come to see some problems that the creators of the sites may not have been able to predict.  Some of these problems are so big as to hurt the sites and make them less usable by large groups of users.  In the case of one site, it has made it completely useless to all but a select group of users.  Perhaps the most famous social media site is Digg.com, which runs on user generated content and links which are voted on by other users and, depending on the number of “diggs” they get, either posted to the main page or buried.  Digg does have some problems with so called “power users” that somehow find way to have their stories dominate the home page, but they are more of a nuisance than an actual problem.

The site with the biggest problem at the moment is one that came along after Digg but uses a similar system: Reddit.com, this site is much faster and more fluid than Digg and has stories days before they hit the Digg main page.  One might think that this would make Reddit a better place to go for news and interesting stories but it has a major problem.  The user base that has taken over the site is the problem.  The Reddit community is made up largely of two groups at the moment, those that want to see funny pictures with little to no content associated with it and militant atheists.  A quick glance at the home page for Reddit will usually show at least a quarter of the stories either attacking religion or screaming about how destructive and violent Israel is.  It is possible to log into Reddit and to remove the atheist stories, but most people just want to take a quick look at the site and see what is going on without logging in every time.  I’m not going to go into whether or not religion is good or bad, but many people are religious and they don’t enjoy going through stories about how stupid or un-intelligent they are before they get to something they might like to read about.  Now none of this is really Reddit’s fault, they just put the system in place but the user base has made the site unfriendly towards a large user base.

Twitter is another example of how social sites can have unintended problems that can ruin the experience for new users.  I recently tried out an application called TweetDeck and posted on my Twitter feed how I did not like the “mystery meat” interface.  Apparently there are “social media experts” and marketing people that look for certain keywords – TweetDeck was obviously a keyword because the number of people that were following me jumped from 4 to 67 in a matter of hours.  I tried to do the nice thing and follow the people who were now following me, but they seem to be posting nothing but marketing tips.  I recently saw a tweet from Chris Pirillo in which he claimed that 20,000 of his followers did not really count because they were all internet or social media experts.  When I got through digging through all of my new followers that were marketing “experts” I found myself down to about 6 followers again.  So the problem with Twitter is self professed marketing experts desperately trying to increase their numbers in an attempt at gaining an audience for whatever they are looking to sell.  This user base wants Twitter as an advertising tool rather than a social networking site full of micro updates for your friends to see – which is what the vast majority of us want.

Social media and social news sites are great, but they are always in danger of being overrun by groups that will turn those sites into nothing more than echo chambers for what they want to hear.  Once that happens the people that don’t want to exist in that echo chamber have no choice but to move on – shrinking the user base and hurting the possibility of those sites getting profitable.