Wisdom of Crowds: WTF?

I'm always game to join a new social network in its infancy, or beta stage. Some deserve the crib death they get. One of these, in my opinion, was Wisia.us.

The tagline explained the goofy premise: The Wisdom of Crowds. Really? Crowds are wise? This puts me in mind of a mob, like YouMob, another beta group clinging to life. Crowds tend to do unwise things: lynchings, beatings, following Manson, listening to Limbaugh. Crowds are rioters, soccer hooligans, fans who made festival seating deadly at Altamont, losers who don sheets and burn crosses.

But Wisia was new and nice and since the crowds were in fact people sitting alone at their computers, I felt relatively safe. So I entered my question, to be answered by other members. "I'm feeling low. What can I do to feel better?"

I waited excitedly for answers. See, Wisia was already working. I was feeling anxious now, not low. Answers started to trickle in: listen to music. Sound advice. Drink some wine. Alcohol in the morning? Hmmm. Read a book. What if I only have depressing books? Call a friend. Ditto. Pray. I'm an atheist. Next.

Then I realized that a question has to get eight answers before it can go to Phase 2 and be seen by everyone on the front page. I noticed that other members were answering their own questions in order to complete Phase 1. This seemed like cheating but hey, if everybody else was doing it, why not? I was really getting into the swing of this mob mentality thing.

I threw in a couple innocuous suggestions. I don't remember what they were: buy some flowers, call your shrink, whatever. Then I threw in "kill a hobo." This could brighten one's day, couldn't it? In fact, I thought it was such a great idea that I started answering other people's questions with it. "What should I do tonight?" "Kill a hobo." "How can I make the world a better place?" "Kill a hobo." And so on. Sometimes I would add "you know you want to" in the comments.

I checked in later, eager to see if anyone got a chuckle out of my suggestion. After all, who would take that seriously? It was a quaint idea and an obvious joke. Would I really advocate murder? Who even says "hobo" anymore? As it turned out, the puppet masters of Wisia had excised every mention of member-on-hobo violence. They'd picked me out of the crowd. I felt chastened, then angry.

I contacted the site runners and asked why this would be removed, since it was meant to incite a chuckle, not violence. While filling out the contact form, I saw a question on the help page from another member, one who'd been booted entirely from the site for suggesting "strap a bomb to myself" somewhere.

The first answer to my fellow smart aleck was something to the effect that they'd found a lot of inappropriate entries they hadn't expected and were having to be very Draconian about them. The message thread continued with the excommunicated member desperately asking to be reinstated. He gave an example of someone else who'd suggested "suicide" to someone and was not punished. He was rebuffed.

I never received an answer as to why my hobo remark had been deleted. I guess I should have just been happy not to have been expelled from the crowd entirely. I lost interest and stopped visiting. Recently, I ran across the site's name in my old bookmarks and clicked to see how it was doing. Wisia is no more. I'm not sure why it shut down, but I could hazard a guess. The earnest folks were unhappy with the wisenheimers, who in turn found the earnest ones boring.

It was flawed from the start: the idea that crowds are wise and give good advice is ridiculous. Go to Yahoo Answers and ask about how to treat autism, lupus or the common cold and you'll see what I mean. Prayer and drinking will be in the answers somewhere, along with mustard poultices and remote healing.

The expectation that people would ask interesting questions and others would give interesting answers while offending no one was the developer's original conceit. But some of the members, the ones who don't have "mean people suck" as their retarded mantra, saw it differently. Wisia couldn't choose what kind of crowd it got and sank under the weight of its own pretense.

Sometimes you have to go into battle with the crowd you have, not the crowd you want. Wisia's mistake was not recognizing the worth of its wise asses. The wisdom's right there in the name.