In general, content generated by communities is dragged down to the lowest common denominator. There are, however, some very notable exceptions.

Popularity Contests

Content, especially multimedia, that is judged by its popularity, and not necessarily its academic quality, thrives in community settings. New versions, parodies, and works inspired by music or videos crop up quickly. The most popular content is voted up and passed around, and anything that is of lower quality (meaning popularity), or simply old, fades away.

Here It Goes Again—A Viral Hit

A band called “OK, GO” released a music video that made its way onto YouTube—it was a viral smash:

Here It Goes Again

Here It Goes Again, Again—A Remix of a Viral Hit

Some time after the first music video was a hit, the following parody/remix video (along with tons of others) was posted:

Here It Goes Again, Again

Often a big hit will inspire several mini-hits and take-offs. Media is an example of community content that is benefited from, and not dragged down by, community influence.

Content Granularity

The other major reason that media and blogs benefit from communities, instead of being dragged down by them, is the content granularity—the community creates lots and lots of small, encapsulated works, instead of working on one large work. Each individual work is judged on its own, unlike collections made up of pieces but judged as a whole, such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. So communities with fine content granularity are not harmed by community content generation.

Niches

Self-selecting niches, groups of people that naturally congregate and have common interests and skills, overcome the problems of community-generated content. A niche naturally attracts those that belong and repels (or is ignored by) those that do not. However, they don’t solve the problem of having the content dragged down to the lowest common denominator, they simply solve the problem of raising that denominator.

When you talk about raising the quality of work in a community project (or a business), then, you must make your content granularity finer, dispose of the “unworthy” parts before they are incorporated into the whole, and make sure your niches or teams are selected well—whether the members are naturally or intentionally chosen.