Re:Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
by blader on Monday April 16, 2007 @03:44PM
(#13368)
I think what Daniel is saying is that on social news sites, popular posts tend be popular because they're popular.
I don't think we can attribute Google's success to cumulative effects:
I suspect that you can see cumulative advantage effects only when objective quality is difficult or impossible to measure. Taste in music is extremely subjective - it's very difficult to measure the quality of music independent of its popularity.
On the other hand, the objective quality of search results can be measured by independent testing and feedback - it's not perfect - but you can get a much better measurement of quality for search than you can for music.
I don't think we can attribute Google's success to cumulative effects:
I suspect that you can see cumulative advantage effects only when objective quality is difficult or impossible to measure. Taste in music is extremely subjective - it's very difficult to measure the quality of music independent of its popularity.
On the other hand, the objective quality of search results can be measured by independent testing and feedback - it's not perfect - but you can get a much better measurement of quality for search than you can for music.