Trusting Crowds We Can See
The search for authenticity can drive you crazy. Anomie has been a problem for centuries, and as the scale and pace of society continues to ramp up, so to does the issue of social atomization. While inter connectivity allows for faster communication and more effective communication, not all of that communication has positive intentions. Our ability to tell the difference between genuine offers and hostile confidence games is diminished with the absence of body language and vocal pitch in online spaces. Fake reviews for sale abound. There’s even a market for fake customers and viewers: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/11/technology/youtube-fake-view-sellers.html?mtrref=duckduckgo.com&gwh=1D16249BF2772DD9AB59953A2F127A06&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL
Transparency of some sort seems like the obvious direction this environment, but what would that look like. Lets take a popular service in Boulder, CO, as an example. GrubHUB.com is a delivery service that allows you to order food from restaurants that don’t normally deliver, as well as facilitating orders to places that do. Boulder is a college town full of creatives and engineers, perhaps the two groups of people most prone to losing track of time during a deep dive into a project. I’ve certainly failed in my basic responsibility as an adult mammal to feed myself more than once and had to rely on GrubHub to save the day. It’s a great business, but it’s also trapped in some of the same structural issues everyone else is dealing with. Namely, the review process as a mechanism for relaying societies opinions. Here’s a basic example:
The trusted reviewer system is a mechanism to sift the true reviews from false ones, but it also slows down the flow of information. Generating trusted reviewers necessarily takes time, and that means a lack of daily input about how the business is doing. Sometimes it will be days between reviews for a popular business, for an unpopular business it can be months or even years before an update occurs, and even if the review appears it’s just one persons opinion. What if GrubHub added a tap, next to it’s ratings tab, for sales traffic updated in real time.
You could see how many people have ordered today, yesterday, or this week. You could see what the average dollar amount spent was to predict is, rather than average menu prices. A digital window into the expanded floor space of your favorite pizza place. Perhaps information about popular orders updated in real time might also be helpful, maybe the fish isn’t fresh today.
What We Trust Crowds To Do
We don’t expect large numbers of people to collectively make the perfect decision, but at least in terms of food choice, we can expect them to not be horrifically wrong. An ocean of digital footprints generates a digital simulacra of a genuine crowd, and the baseline trust we have in crowds generates baseline level of authenticity. Let’s figure out how to use it.
