[briga]

>So while you're right that we used to rely on gossip and hearsay, simply amplifying the number of sources in no way implies that we're getting a less biased message.

That's sort of what I was getting at. At heart, these new technologies aren't necessarily more reliable than what we had before. But on the other hand, I think that at the very least they're not any less reliable either. Simply by having more people reaching a consensus on something, you're probably going to have some great diversity of opinion.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that there are four factors that determine whether or not a crowd will be able to make intelligent decisions: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and mechanisms for aggregation of collective judgement. Not to be self-congratulatory, but I think that's part of the reason communities like HN produce more intelligent and well-reasoned content than, say, an NRA fan club on Facebook.