Very interesting Jon. As someone who tried and gave up on Stack Overflow (and the ba-jillions of spawned stack hypenated sites, I find the problem fascinating. The problem with stack overflow is more complex than simple repuation and gaming the system. The ranking system becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare. Those who gamed to very high initial repuation became self-perpetuating 'gurus' who then anwered every single question, and the answer was immediately upvoted (whether the answer was good or bad) because of their reputation.

There's also an insidious underbelly to stack-X, and that is that many who gamed are somehow also "insiders". To put it very simply, never, EVER down-rank an answer by one of these gurus. You will be punished in very mysterious ways - certainly ways no ordinary user can accomplish.

The end problem is that only the "pro" answerers every answer stuff anymore. Amateurs can never gain enough reputation to have a "good" answer because the system rewards only the mighty. So for the most part very intellegent persons with real knowledge stop answering as they get tired of being downvoted simply because they are not "the gods".

It reminds me of an episode of South Park where the boys took down a MMORPG player who had so many points he could and did kill all the other. The sequences where they built up points for the final battle by gaming the system was quite funny. (if you are a south park viewer).

Jon,

I also find this veryinteresting.

It actually reminds me of the "shared" highlighting within the Kindle apps of various flavors. A colleague is an English educator and reported on how students reading on a Kindle viewed what was they found interesting a text being significantly influenced by what others had already highlighted.

Gerald

@Richard - indeed. Terry Anderson and I describe the social form of Stack Exchange as predominantly that of the set: it is about people clustering around shared interests, topics, etc, rather than becoming connected and, as long as it stays that way and the algorithms for collective intelligence are sound, it works pretty well. Unfortunately, networks form - people become known to others and, especially combined with the power you mention, the crowd is no longer so free of bias. In effect, they add more parts to the algorithm that work counter to the main one that drives it because, like all social media, it is a soft system composed of people and process.  I wonder whether it would help to anonymize (randomly for each post, so you cannot track individuals) every reply? Individuals would still see their own name and there would still be accountability, badges, relative power, and all the rest - there would just be no external signs of a person's identity.  Some people might self-identify, which could potentially mess things up again, but that would backfire if others impersonated those self-identified individuals in an attempt to boost their own karma, so I doubt that many would care to do so.

@Gerald - very true. Also true of the glosses, annotations, etc of traditional books but the effects are very limited, for the most part, to individual volumes in libraries. I am certainly influenced by those highlights, not just when reading but to the extent that it feels weird adding my own highlight to the same place and even weirder to add one that is nearby or that overlaps. A similar problem affects citation indexes - the best way to get cited is to get cited. Andrew Chiarella has done some fascinating work on using this effect with his CoRead system, which exploits collective highlighting in a big way.  Like me in my own CoFIND system, he found it useful within a small, focused group with shared goals and surrounding pedagogical processes to drive it. The problem becomes bigger in larger crowds formed of networks and sets, where such group processes and norms are sparser or non-existent. Generically, it is an instance of the Matthew Effect - them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose - which is one of a larger family of systems of preferential attachment. But there are lots of ways that complex adaptive systems in nature avoid that positive feedback trap to stay on the edge of chaos, including delay, parcellation, negative feedback loops, finite energy, etc. My first book (and a couple of papers derived from it) was in a large part a theoretically grounded attempt to come up with ways of designing social media for self-organized learning that utilize rather than suffer from such effects. I came up with a set of design principles that I really should get round to refining and revisiting some day.  One or two of these ideas have found their way into the Landing, though not as many as I'd like.

Jon

"..relying on one company and one system.." -- the same thing     like putting all eggs in one bucket..

@Elena - indeed, except that it is a bucket owned and completely controlled by someone that wants you to buy more eggs or rent a bigger bucket; that may at its discretion decide to replace your eggs with pebbles;  that could and probably will decide that you need a smaller bucket with fewer eggs but that costs more money;  that could at any time take the bucket away completely, leaving you eggless;  that could be taken over by a company that will replace your nice eggs with rotten eggs and then start throwing them at you, sharing pictures of the event with its friends. You would, of course, like to get out of this rotten deal but, once you have moved your eggs into the bucket, they are scrambled by the bucket owner, so you can never get them back in one piece ever again or move them to a different bucket, and you are forced to eat scrambled eggs forever even though you now prefer them hard boiled or you've heard of a great new bucket that offers poaching instead. The issue is essentially one of egg control. The reason I prefer the Wordpress approach is that you get to keep all of your own eggs and can do what you like with them but, if you want, you can pay Wordpress to assure that they remain in one piece, that they don't go off and, if you wish, its chefs will cook them the way you like them.

The other aspect of closed solutions is privacy. As pointed out in this FSF call for donations the proliferation of computers in every aspect of our lives, from home automation to chips in our own bodies, "raises ethical issues inherent in proprietary software". So, closed software is only acceptable where the model of trust is built in other ways. External hosting is as well subject to a model of trust. A Wordpress hosted solution as you pointed out Jon, is acceptable as there is no personal information involved. Things are different when it comes to entire infrastructure as you don't want to have a 3rd party spying on your communication and that's why private clouds powered by open source technologies are becoming popular. As this RedHat page puts it: "Unlike a public cloud, a private cloud is for a single organization. You implement it behind your corporate firewall under IT’s control. A private cloud is great for speeding innovation, handling large compute and storage needs, and securing data".

One comment about anyone putting backdoors into products is that they don't just allow the intended persons access, they also create a significant weakness in any security the product might have had.

It is almost a guarantee now that if some agency has built a backdoor into a product (as with Juniper in this case), the black hat's have already found and exploited it.

Sadly, it was probably hacked within minutes of the product release.

Backdoors are TERRIBLE things. Proprietary software is in many ways worse, because the probability of the company secretly putting a backdoor into the product has pretty much reached "1.0" in the past few years.

This is bad news, although nothing surprising. I do applaud though that Juniper released the advisory. It comes at an interesting time as I was just looking at how GnuPG fundraising campaign was doing. And that was a really pleasant surprise :) It was in 1997 when Richard Stallman "urged the crowd to write their own version of PGP." according to the ProPublica article. To add some facts on security when it comes to closed vs proprietary according to SECPOINT the top 2 most secure operating systems are OpenBSD followed by Linux and in 3rd place the BSD based OSX.

Not surprisingly, the back door was at least known to both NSA and GCHQ for several years - http://flip.it/wVQ5C - crazy that we should trust proprietary systems like this.