Sunday, June 24, 2007

Human Powered Web 2.0 Beta Fad is Bad - Send in the Machines

There was a pretty good article and ok comments in a recent Matt Cutts post located at Matt Cutts SEO Blog. It touches on a topic that has annoyed me a bit and gives me a reason to rant here for a few moments.

The post is addressing a fad I believe is rising in tech blogs lately.

I have seen the fad in tech blogs to positively cover any technology that adds "human powered", or similar adjectives, to the description of a website or new technology. An example would be "human powered directory". Despite nearly everything online having a human in control somewhere, I don't think it is necessarily better to have a predominantly human powered site these days.

I think we saw what happens when a website grows to enormous proportions and leaves the most important jobs to humans. It is called Dmoz. I think it has become the most useless, over-rated site in existence. It started out great, but when anything doesn't scale well you will have problems.

As the traffic starts to grow, the first problems are usually delays. Years ago, Dmoz could have you included fairly quickly as long as the website wasn't total junk. These days, it can take years to be listed, and doesn't seem to be dropping the junk that snuck in.

Another problem is the ability for corruption in a large human network. I think we are starting to realize this again with paid digging today. Software can of course be vulnerable, but it can also be altered. Try altering some of the corrupt editors at Dmoz that offer paid listings in freelancer sites with hard to track accounts. Good luck. Software doesn't usually have a hidden agenda contrary to the developers' desires despite what most developers may think as they pound on their keyboards trying to get their latest monster to compile. Humans usually do have a hidden agenda.

Near the last few months of 2006, Dmoz ran into issues when the humans couldn't figure out how to fix their directory. For months editors were being blamed and yet weren't at fault this time. A "human powered" directory buckled and hasn't been the same since. Lost listings were replaced with extremely old listings, many of which were no longer active and horrible, dangerous websites were polluting the listings yet again.

Why couldn't the "human powered" directory fix the problem in a timely manner? The humans screwed up. Sufficient backups weren't in place, humans couldn't act fast enough, etc. all causing the oxymoron, "human powered" website, to become as apparent as ever.

If only they had paid more attention to the scalability and better hardware and software. They were too busy trying to keep corrupt editors in line. Sound a little familar? Dig a little and you may find this happening again today.

I, for one, love technology. I love robots. I love computers and software. I dislike way more humans than I do machines. I distrust way more humans than I do machines. If I happen to distrust a machine/software, I usually find a human at fault. Sometimes it is me.

I think it is great that we are using way more machines and software to do the jobs of untrustworthy people. The good people will move on and be useful elsewhere. The bad ones will whine and whine and whine and push traffic to sites with "human powered" hovering near the "beta" logo.

I think this fad is ridiculous and I think we should be very happy that Google doesn't have millions of underpaid child laborers tucked away in bunkers connecting everyone up to "pariz hiltun neekid". Leave that to the software.

Send in the machines.