DISQUS

Aidan Henry · 1 year ago

This sounds like the argument that anti-social media critics use. They use the term "mediocrity of the amateur" and argue that a small number of unique, knowledgeable voices are better than a whole bunch of semi-knowledgeable, amateur voices.

I think the argument has some merit, but ignores a lot of the advantages of social media as well...

Cheers,
Aidan
www.MappingTheWeb.com

mathewi · 1 year ago

I agree that it's a common argument made by anti-UGC types, Aidan --
and I recently wrote a post taking BusinessWeek to task for doing just
that. But I think Steve's point is slightly different -- not so much
that all UGC is crap, but that you still need editors of some shape or
form to sift through things a bit and weed out some of the clutter.

Rob Hyndman · 1 year ago

Well, I think the case can be made that the reality of it is closer to what Aidan is talking about. There is just so much dross out there. And I think there is much more of a nexus between this and your recent blog post about why techcrunch bothered to write about Mixx than people might suppose. Why? Because they can, and not really because they should. Editing and professionalism can still go a long way to curing various content ills.

I'm not - GASP!! - getting all Keen-sian on you <insert other ideological purity assurances here>, just stating what ought to be reasonably obvious now. There is an ocean of crap out there, a lot of it is UGC, and sorting through it is proving to be awfully hard.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Agreed -- although I would argue that the amount of dross on either
side of the professional-UGC content divide is roughly equal. One
gets a lot more attention than the other, that's all -- in part
because we've gotten used to the kind that's been around forever, so
we don't really even see it any more.

Rob Hyndman · 1 year ago

Well, I'd take issue with you there, and I've always thought the "MSM ain't all it's cracked up to be" argument to be kind of a straw-man (or is that red herring?). Sure, but all in all the MSM was / is ohhh-kay, and there are filters in place to help assure some minimum quality controls. They sometimes fail, even spectacularly so (hello Judith Miller), but you rarely in the MSM see writers bit**-slapping each other with puerile, adolescent ferocity, or engaging in deep ruminations about the most banal details of their brain droppings.

But perhaps more importantly, for every MSM contributor there are, oh, about a gajillion UGC contributors. Which means a much hard job of sifting through the crap. And the aggregation tools out there really do only filter on popularity, and while that may sometimes be a rough proxy for quality, Jennifer Lopez has proved beyond any doubt that that is often spectacularly *not* the case, and I don't really want to spend *that* much time immersed in material that suits the lowest common denominator / has the broadest possible appeal.

Jury's still out, IMO. Or perhaps more accurately, we really, really need tools to help us take out the garbage. Can we have them now, please?

mathewi · 1 year ago

I would agree -- although I don't think the "MSM isn't so hot either"
argument is a straw man at all. I think we've just become used to it
and so we don't really even notice any more, or we filter out the
worst of it ourselves.

I see MSM writers of all kinds doing virtually no research -- or only
enough to make the point they've already decided to make --
bit**-slapping other writers (albeit with larger words in some cases)
and generally behaving badly in all sorts of ways. We've just come to
accept that as part of the MSM, and yet UGC is supposed to somehow be
better than that.

And while there may be more crap, there's more good stuff too --
although I agree we need help finding it.