On signal to noise and the blogosphere

"Signal to noise" has been a phrase applied to the ratio of quality posts to posts of no merit ever since there has been a medium for the masses on the Internet, starting with the venerable Usenet, and being applied also to the realms of e-mail lists and web boards of all types. The grand unified theory of signal-to-noise, in any medium where all involved have equal post rights, involves two equations:

• As the number of users increases, without moderation, the number of users with high output of noise increases, because there is a bell curve distribution of users with less than 100% signal on average.
• As the signal to noise ratio decreases, the number of users with high output of signal decreases (those higher on the bell curve), as they are frustrated with their careful efforts getting equal attention to the nonsense as well as usually too bothered to keep up with nonsense, especially by way of response.
  

These two equations work together to contribute to the decline of any unmoderated channel's signal-to-noise ratio. There is also a law of Usenet that any moderated channel will not survive if there is an unmoderated channel with the same function and topic. This all is why Usenet has been abandoned as a primary means of collaborative communication by most of the people who were originally there, at some point following the commercialization of the Internet in the mid 1990s.

The fine-tuning of permissions and moderation policies possible on e-mail lists and web forums has further proven that excess selectiveness of moderation has a depressive effect on posting quantity, even as it brings up the ratio of signal to noise; there would have been more absolute signal with less moderation, and this is in part because even a bit of nonsense can be redeemed into a productive thread by those who don't write nonsense generally.

How does this apply to the blogosphere? It is an interesting medium because, in order to have a full voice, one needs to cultivate one's own forum in which he or she is the primary speaker (or on a consortium of speakers), which is entirely unlike the format in which everyone can participate equally who happens to be reading and logs in. Indeed, it feels more like the bloggers are individuals who step up, in turn, to the podium and give presentations or speeches, while the rest of the people logged in (with comments) are merely raising hands in the audience. It's explicitly a system where one does not get an equal vote by right of participation alone, but by how much one invests in that participation by cultivating ones own blog, and in this way is more like an oligopoly than a democracy, with every blogger plying his own way.

Are you with me? Since every blogger is competing for market share--readership and greater recognition among the rest of the blogosphere--in order to get his or her comments seen, instead of having them automatically seen by all who are paying attention to a certain list subscription, there is an organic moderating effect on all bloggers. Quite simply, if people think you are not making enough signal compared to the noise your blog produces, they can stop following your blog posts as much. It's like the "invisible hand" of the free market, and in this case it very nearly works as Adams promised, since there is very good (if not perfect) information available to the blog consumer and there is very low barrier to entry for the blogger. The best blogs get read most, where "best" is measured as that which people want to read.

This blog post is entirely theoretic except for a single note that is not meant to be sensational, but which will illustrate the point. Stephen C. Carlson updated his blog a half dozen times in December and only once so far in January, the latter being a terse note about the revival of my Early Christian Writings. I am of course biased because that pretty little note keeps showing up in my gmail list of feeds followed and because I have been in touch with Stephen several times by instant messenger, but it's got to be admitted that when Stephen posts, there's usually something worth reading. Meanwhile, the indefatigueable Jim West outshines all other bloggers on the Bible by a mile for consistency of high volume of output over time. For that reason, you either love his blog, or you may (as I quickly am) tire of having it in your list of to-read blogs. Due to my absense from the blogosphere, I'm currently fighting to keep up with what's being written now so that I can delve here and there into what was posted in the past. The last straw for having Jim West in my feed list was this Doofy Darwinist post that draws on The Onion to make some kind of oblique dig at Hershel Shanks's BAR magazine. I do not subscribe to the Biblical Archaeology Review, I do not read The Onion, and I won't be keeping Jim West's blog in my Google Reader. All of these cases relate to the fundamental axiom of optimizing your reading activity in this respect, which is to eliminate those sources with intolerable levels of noise.