The New Digital Tastemakers

I love Kickstarter. A while ago I scraped a bunch of data from Kickstarter (seriously, of all the sites that should have an API), and noticed the overwhelming impact on project success of being promoted by Kickstarter. I can’t prove causality, but I’m still completely convinced: the Kickstarter staff can dramatically bias outcomes.

Let’s turn to Product Hunt. The inner circle at PH can allegedly post directly to the front page, bypassing the normal up-voting process, while other projects must sink or swim on merit alone.

Now, Medium. I love this site, but the Medium Staff clearly has a collective bias, and the members exercise a lot of control over the average feed. Not just the feed, either, take a look at my sidebar today:

Medium really wants me to see stories about feminism. There isn’t any room for anything else, just these three stories, repeated three times. Once isn’t enough. I may be able to add more variety, but it’s not obvious how.

In each case, the path of least resistance is influenced by a small group of company insiders. In an ideal system, we would want some good reason for handing that much influence to a small group. In these examples, it’s accidental. It is simply a result of being a member of The Staff.

Please don’t mistake me. I’m not taking aim at any particular issue. I’m not taking aim at feminism just because I used it as an example. Rather, I’m saying that by allowing a small group of homogeneous insiders to be tastemakers, merit-based success is undermined.

Maybe you think we shouldn’t care about merit, because society is so broken. We need to protect certain principles that would languish and die otherwise. Though I don’t share that point of view, I can understand it. But then, it must be transparent, and it must be optional. I should be allowed to change my Kickstarter feed to a merit-based one. Product Hunt should label insider submissions. Medium should allow me to control what shows up in my feed much more easily. (I’ve asked not to be shown stories recommended by the Medium Staff at least 50 times now, and I’m starting to see the impact, but obviously, given my example above, my scope of control is still limited.)

Aside from merit, there is another issue. Diversity. I want my nine sidebar slots to show nine distinct stories, rather than three. Because Medium is so interested in promoting a particular topic, it sacrifices variety. In my example, it reduces the number of stories shown by two-thirds. That’s significant. It makes me wonder if we are missing out on interesting articles, projects, and products because exploration is curtailed by the tastemakers.

Innovation and diversity of ideas go hand-in-hand. The lower the variety of thoughts we think, the lower the potential for radical, life-changing innovation. By restricting what we read on Medium, bring to life on Kickstarter, and support on Product Hunt, we have weakened our ability to see and explore the new.

I ask: why do we allow this?