Web 2.0: is trusting the user implicitly a recipe for diaster?

[mandy]

As the web 2.0 hype continues to become ever more frothy, it becomes more and more obvious that abusing the inherent 'social goodness' is not really that difficult.

To take a step back, the big trust in social sites is that most users are good, and the few that are bad, the good users can easily police them. Not exactly the same, but even Larry Page from Google believed that most users are good. iBegin's philosophy (point #2) clearly spells out that users are trusted to deal with the minority that are spammers. And (getting to the point now), Digg operates under the premise that if a story is spam/inaccurate/etc, users will mark it before it gets promoted. And if it does get promoted and people report it, a little text message will be added notifying users that the article may very well be wrong.

Now, the abuse of the beforementioned power has come to rear twice on Digg...

full article: http://forevergeek.com/geek_articles/web...o_much.php