Good story. I completely agree that all of this auto-curation will bury the eclectic collections and poison discovery.
That is one big reason I started my side project, curabase.com[1], to simply enable anyone to curate their own list of bookmarks. (Not a new idea, but it is MY idea based on this singlular thought -- that human curation will always be better, and NO. I don't have data to back it up :-)
But human curation can be bought/influenced. So, in your system, influential curators could be influenced by advertisers to display certain links in their list of bookmarks?
Says he was suspended, not fired. Also, he was deliberately messing with their metrics. Presumably they want to sell or otherwise discard books that no one is checking out in favor of ones that have useful and relevant information. By pretending that the ones no one cares about are actually popular, you're preventing the library from acquiring books that people actually want to read.
Their metrics may be flawed, but it's not like all discarding of books is a bad idea.
[+] [-] sheraz|9 years ago|reply
That is one big reason I started my side project, curabase.com[1], to simply enable anyone to curate their own list of bookmarks. (Not a new idea, but it is MY idea based on this singlular thought -- that human curation will always be better, and NO. I don't have data to back it up :-)
[+] [-] bmer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sohkamyung|9 years ago|reply
[1] Bellwether: Connie Willis's classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness [ https://boingboing.net/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-... ]
[+] [-] thefastlane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x1798DE|9 years ago|reply
Their metrics may be flawed, but it's not like all discarding of books is a bad idea.
[+] [-] falcor84|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezoe|9 years ago|reply