How the revolting Twittermobs are devaluing Whuffie

The Twitter Lynchmob kicked off when a UK Twitterer dared to find Stephen Fry "a bit boring" has made the New York Times. That is an astounding occurrence for what is still a tiny social network. But to me the more interesting thing about this is its another lesson (after quite a few in recent weeks) of the way Whuffie (Social Capital) really works in Social Networks, despite the best intentions of the optimists.

In a nutshell, the lessons are that:

- All Social Networks seem to follow a strong power law effect, with top status people having a lot more Whuffie than the majority in the Long Tail. It is also an increasing returns dynamic, ie the rich get even richer over time (exacerbated by things like "suggested user lists" of high whuffie individuals)

- If you are even slightly unpleasant to someone with a very large number of followers, a non-trivial % will prove to be rabid acolytes, and you will be hounded by those people with virtual torches and pitchforks.

- Even if the high whuffie person probably had no real desire to cause such damage in the first place, the acolytes will still egg each other on.

- A Low Whuffie person who is hammered online by the acolytes of a high Whuffie person will have very little redress, at least initially, as....

- It takes time for some form of "fairness grouping" to emerge, in which time a lot of damage can potentially be done (addresses and phone numbers are given out online for example)

What this implies is twofold:

(i) Without some form of internal system moderation, whether manual or automatic, a social network will by its structure tend to mob lynch rule.

(ii) To any external party that the mob rule is trying to influence, Whuffie will be massively devalued. Taking the episodes of the last few weeks, Trafigura was high impact, but who is realistically going to take a Twitter campaign as seriously after this weekend. And after 10 more such occurrences (and there will be 10 more, probably by New Year). And 100?

I was trying to put some numbers to this latter point today and used the concept of "weak" vs "strong" tells to define one's committment to The Cause (whatever it is).

On Twitter, all I need do is Re-Tweet a call to action, or (slightly more time) press a Vote button on some online poll set up, install a twibbon or paint my avatar some colour. A matter of a few seconds. These are very weak tells, take virtually no effort.

Now imagine if I tried to complain in "real life" - probably the least effort is to send an email to some politician or body responsible - its probably several minutes to write, lets say about 2 - so thats c 120 seconds to say 1-2 for a retweet. So an email is 2 orders of magnitude stronger as a "tell".

Using real goods, the easiest is probably a postcard to said politician or body responsible - I'd argue that its probably 10 times more effort than an email to write, post, deliver and read at the other side, never mind the price of a stamp. This is starting to become a strong tell.

And by the time its a march of protestors giving up a whole day, that's several thousand orders of magnitude stronger as a tell.

Thus, many more of these sort of "24 hour witch burnings" on Twitter and most people will shrug off a Twitter Mob as you would an attack by a horde of storm flies - some will irritate your eyes and ears, some will get up your nose and in your hair, but they will be easily brushed off.

In other words, the correct response to the cry "The peasants on Twitter are revolting" (again) is, Yes, they are, aren't they

Which is a pity, because sometimes the wolves being bayed at are real, like in the Trafigura case.

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