Kazriko Rugxungo ([info]kazriko) wrote,
@ 2009-05-04 17:21:00
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Current mood: annoyed
Entry tags:last.fm, music

Another problem with Democracy
Last.fm... They pick their artist pictures via a democratic process where you can vote them up or down. The other major issue with last.fm is that they have no solution for disambiguation of artists, so when you get down into the small indie bands there's a great deal of overlap in names with different bands songs getting intermixed as well as the tags related to them.

In this case, both problems are cropping up at the same time. A band that I really enjoy, but has a very low profile is Goner. They've released 3 CDs thus far and I enjoy all of them. They share a name with a band that seems to have only released a single song and has been tagged as "grindcore," their only song is about 1 minute long and absolutely awful compared to the other band.

The problem is that the smaller band and their friends are aggressively promoting their pictures on the "goner" page and voting down the pictures from the other band. Because only a handful of the hundreds of listeners from the larger band even look at that page, they're getting away with it. This goes back to the concept that democracy is rule by those able to speak loudest and convince the most people to pay attention on their side.

Because of this, whenever I play a song from the great Goner band, I get that urgly picture from the horrible Goner band on my profile...

If anyone feels like helping me out on last.fm though, http://www.last.fm/music/Goner is the band, and http://www.last.fm/music/Goner/+images/21975209 is the only picture from the real band.


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[info]rickynumber24
2009-05-06 05:14 pm UTC (link)
It's always too tempting to play devil's advocate...

I submit that this is not a problem with democracy, but, instead, a problem with namespace collision. You pointed out that they tag things by band title. If they were to use some sort of unique identifer per band (munge the end of the band name in the database or something...), this would solve that problem very simply. On the other hand, since anybody who is reasonably well-known essentially locks their name in forever, the programmers at last.fm probably didn't consider that there might be this problem. (I, for one, didn't know this sort of thing happened, although I'm pretty sure that's mostly because I never really thought about it.) The problem here is not that democracy is broken or anything like that: it's simply that the last.fm programmers did not consider an edge case which they may not have seen coming, whether they should have or not. (... and presumably most of their customers don't run into...)

[I should also note that external name registration for bands to prevent namespace collisions would solve this problem, but there are so many issues with that suggestion that I know neither of us would find it acceptable.]

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[info]kazriko
2009-05-06 06:56 pm UTC (link)
You're right that it's not 100% a problem with democracy. As I mentioned, it's a combination of the problem you mentioned and a problem with democracy. If you could solve either problem it would fix this instance. External registration isn't the answer as there's a huge history of bands with the same names.

The problem with democracy is that it's a contest of who can rally the most people to their cause, either by dragging in otherwise uninterested friends, or by making the best speeches even if they are not correct, and additionally by coercion, though that isn't a problem in Last.FM.

The US federal government is very good at getting their way by coercion and using that to manipulate democratic processes to their whims. They get you dependent on a federal subsidy then they start threatening to take it away if you don't vote for this person, or vote for this state law. You can't just take the hit because you now rely on that subsidy to survive. This has stepped up full steam recently with the TARP funds.

This is why I tell everyone to avoid getting into bed with the government, what sounds like an equitable or beneficial deal now will turn into a lever that they can use to control you down the road.

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