The Techmeme pile-on — good or bad? – – mathewingram.com/work

The Techmeme pile-on — good or bad? – - mathewingram.com/work:

Tim O’Reilly has a great post up on O’Reilly Radar, in which he talks about what might be called (although he doesn’t use the term) the “stupidity of crowds.” Using the meltdown in quantitative hedge funds, Facebook apps and Techmeme.com as examples, he talks about how too many people chasing the same idea causes a decline in the value of that idea. As he puts it:

“When a group of seemingly independent actors are making decisions based on the same limited pool of information, they become more highly correlated, and thus “stupider.”

Or as I like to put it –

The first thing an echo chamber does is convince itself it’s not an echo chamber

The group attracts people with the same attitudes and opinions. At some point, diversity is squeezed out because opinions that don’t fit the “common mindset” get piled on and buried — just ask anyone who’s tried to comment on slashdot that microsoft is not evil incarnate, or that Linux isn’t perfect — and people learn fast to fit in or get bitchslapped.

And then once everyone “fits in”, they convince themselves that because everyone around them thinks like this, everyone obviously thinks like this. Which is false, but the group looks around and only sees nodding heads, and therefore discounts that they might be wrong. Ultimate Yes Men (soon coming to Xbox 360).

Classic cases of this are the iPhone and the Apple TV. Both are products that are built for consumers, and while they have strong geek attraction, they aren’t built and designed for geeks. Geeks complain about things these products don’t do. Apple ignores them. Geeks try to spin them into failures because they don’t cater to geeks. the product sells zillions of units anyway. The geeks brains hurt.

(for instance, best as I can find, the new generation Tivo sold 30,000 units in the first few months. Apple TV? 250,000 units. Yet you look around the geek echo chamber, and they declare the Apple TV a failed product, while drooling over Tivos. Of course, if you read Sean Avery’s NY Times article this week, you’ll see he calls out his Apple TV as a toy he loves. It’s a great product. Just not a geek product. But since all products ought to be geek products — that makes it a failure inside the geek echo chamber.

Ditto the iPhone and openness and ddevelopment kits and applications and hacking and etc. Piper Jaffray estimated that 10% of iPhones are being unlocked. I think that’s too high, because they seemed to do their survey in New York (where I’d expect the overseas unlockers would flock, because of easy access) and then extrapolated those numbers country wide. In reality, I’d expect unlocking to be more like 5% than 10%, but that’s just me.

Still not a small number: 5% of a million iPhones is 50,000 iPhones; a great little cottage industry, but it’s still ONLY 5%. And for all of the geeks who want the iPhone to fail because it doesn’t do all the things THEY want, and obviously, everyone wants those things.

Except, of course, Apple’s selling hundreds of thousands of iPhones. Why? because if you get outside the geek echo chamber, most people don’t CARE about what the geeks care about. They want the iPhone.

And that’s something I see among the geek echo chamber these days: an undercurrent of “it’s time for Apple to go sour”; not because Apple shows any signs of doing so, except within the mind of the echo chamber, but because Apple insists on catering to the consumer instead of the geek, and geeks don’t like the products without all those geeky-friendly features — and yet those products succeed very well despite the geeks declaring them lame. And since that doesn’t fit what the geeks have convinced themselves to be true, it causes their brains to hurt. Or they simply edit reality to fit the echo chamber reality (“apple TV is a failure, having sold 7X our joyous Tivo”).

Reality is, the geekdom and the geek echo chamber is a niche market. But try telling the geeks that… And when evidence shows up to prove it — they just edit their reality around the evidence to protect the safety of the echo chamber…

You might also want to read:

1. Will paid content work? But can we learn anything from paid content attempts in the past? After all, this has been tried at varying levels before. Until The New...
2. Blogs are so over, Wired magazine says — mathewingram.com/work Blogs are so over, Wired magazine says — mathewingram.com/work: Hey, didn’t you hear? Blogs are so 2004. They’re dead now, says Paul Boutin (who also...
3. Work life balance – good. Working with no balance – bad | Technovia Work life balance – good. Working with no balance – bad | Technovia: If working hard means never having time for your family, you are...
4. Tom Benjamin’s NHL Weblog: Good Night and Good Luck Tom Benjamin’s NHL Weblog: Good Night and Good Luck: The whopping ticket price increase is, to me, another indicator that a deal to relocate the...
5. Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community: I admit it: I%u2019m user-group junkie. I got my first taste of...