Filterers and Finders – which are you?

The world-wide web has grown exponentially over the last decade and there’s every indication that it will continue to do so over the next. But a side-effect of that growth is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find anything meaningfully interesting  to us, whatever our interests are.

There are many reasons why it’s so hard to find stuff that we care about. For starters, the signal to noise ratio is so high  that you have to wade through an awful lot of crap to discover the golden nuggets. According to Netcraft there are in the region of 485,173,671 websites out there and that number is growing by about 22million sites per month. You don’t need to be a maths wizz to realise that that’s a lot of digital content, the vast majority of which is of absolutely no interest to us.

Originally we relied on human-sourced link directories to find interesting content. Yahoo, in its original iteration, was indexed by actual human beings, who vetted all submitted web sites and only included those perceived to have any value. Over time that task became increasingly difficult and Yahoo came to rely on spidered indexes – websites trawled by pre-programmed code. Other search engines, such as Alta Vista and Hotbot, competed with Yahoo for indexing prowess, but they all suffered from the same issue – vast numbers of search returns most of which were irrelevant to the search. It wasn’t until Google came on the scene, with its legendary page-rank logarithm, that it actually became possible to search for stuff easily on the web. Google’s influence on the web cannot be underestimated – I personally find it hard to believe that the web would have prospered even remotely as well as it has, without the awesome search results it made possible.

But even Google cannot guarantee quality search results in this day and age. Sure, it will produce a list of websites that meet the criteria you entered in the search window, but you have no way of knowing whether the content’s reliable or interesting. To find out how good a site’s content is, you inevitably need to click on the first, second and possibly third page of Google search returns, checking each one in turn. It was this fundamental issue which gave birth to the second era of human-indexed searches and the popularity of link-aggregating sites such as Digg, Delicious and, more recently, Reddit. The spiritual heirs of the original Yahoo, they rely on the users to submit and rank content.

But have you ever asked yourself who it is that’s actually submitting the content in the first place? Somebody out there is actually finding the good stuff on those 485,173,671 websites and submitting their results to the link agregators. If they have one, what is their agenda? What about the sites that aren’t being mentioned? How many cool sites are there that never receive the page-views they deserve?

The massive volume of websites and our need to view the meaningful ones has lead to a division in web use and a fundamental split in web users. To put it simply, there are two basic kinds of web surfers – modern-age givers and takers, they are the filterers and the finders. There are fairly radical differences between these two groups but between them they are shaping the make-up and new directions of the world-wide web.

Filterers

There are two kinds of filterers – the professional variety and the recreational kind. The drive behind the growth in the number of professional filterers is the transformation of newspapers from the originators of content into what amounts to little more than link-aggregation-with-comment. The mainstream press is awash with the professional filterers. While there are (thankfully) also a few real journalists at work today (at The Guardian, the NY Times and the few remaining bastions of original journalism), the fact is that the vast majority of the people who fill the digital column inches of the newspapers and magazines are simply filtering content on our behalf.

Yes, you could argue that his has gone on for some time. Newspapers and other media outlets have been taking Reuters and AP’s content and rewording it slightly (if at all), for decades. But what happened after the birth of the web was that the media could bypass the agencies, saving themselves a good deal of money in the process, by employing professional filterers to sift through the stuff online. This in turn has meant that organisations such as Reuters have themselves become media outlets presenting their content directly to the public.

These days the afore-mentioned mainstream press has to compete with the larger blogs. Sites such as Engadget and Mashable get tip-offs from people in industry or, by dint of their large readerships, are made privy to information that other smaller sites are not. Engadget and Mashable filter all this information they get on a daily basis and then decide what they think should be shared. In turn, you often find content originated by the popular blogs appearing in the mainstream press and of course the big media brands such as News Limited and AOL are more than happy to buy the most popular blogs and fold their writers and the content they produce into their own brands.

And then there’s the recreational filterer. These are people who, for one reason or another enjoy sharing content they discover online with others. Sometimes they do it for the feel-good factor, sometimes they do it because they have some vested interest in it, often they do it simply because they can. The home of the recreational filterer is the link aggregation website – Reddit, Digg, Delicious and 4Chan. On sites like these they can build an online persona and, in some cases, turn into link-sharing superstars, such as MrBabyman.

Your average recreational filterer probably has a vast number of bookmarks, built up over many years, including several sites that they feel are their little secret. They love posting breaking news stories on the link aggregation sites and will get quite proprietorial about this if someone posts the same link after them and receives more attention. For the recreational filterer, it’s all about the kudos of bringing a big story to the attention of as many people as possible. Sites like Reddit and Digg are perfect in this regard because users are positively rewarded (virtually speaking) for their link-posting prowess.

Finders

The finders are the recipients of the digital goodness uncovered by the filterers. They’re largely passive users happy to feast on all this information and to comment on something if it interests them enough. In comparison to the filterers, they probably have relatively few websites bookmarked and instead rely on others to bring them interesting factoids. Furthermore they  depend on the social voting mechanisms on sites such as Reddit, relying on the digital diaspora (who decide which stories receive prominence) to bring them only the most ‘important’ nuggets. This means that they may never venture beyond the front page of the link aggregation sites and helps explain why, when a story hits the front page of the link sites, its popularity snowballs.

Of course finders are not completely passive receivers of information and they will often pass on the things that interest them to immediate friends and family on the social networking sites. Funny stories, Snopes material and pictures of cats are all grist to the mill on Facebook. Long after a meme has faded from popularity on Reddit, you’ll find it resurfacing on Facebook. Several years later a story/photo/cartoon inevitably arrives back at the digital front door of the original poster, forwarded on by an aunt or grandmother, complete with several miles of CC’d replies underneath it telling its own story of a binary circumnavigation of the globe.

Hunters and Gatherers

Thanks to the Internet, information does not simply flow from the same old handful of big newspapers and large TV networks. Without the filterers out there, hunting stuff down and posting it on their blog, on Twitter, on Tumblr or on Reddit, Digg and 4Chan, many of the most popular websites on the planet would suddenly find it very hard to produce content to interest their readership. Without the finders, content would wilt and die on the link sites. Thanks to the symbiotic relationship betwen the filterers and the finders, online information which once required search engines to be unearthed, can now get plenty of eyeballs on it. One thing’s for certain – it’s a new world order and the filterers are in charge now.