James Madison would have hated Rotten Tomatoes.

Sure, he might have appreciated the fact that movies existed, but Madison was also the man who, in the Federalist Papers, formulated perhaps the foundational argument against mob rule.

“There is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual,” Madison wrote. “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

Concentrating absolute power in the majority leads to tyranny because nothing prevents large groups from imposing their opinions on small groups. In a phrase, mob rule confuses popularity for quality.

A wise thought from Mr. Madison, and one that sadly applies across much of the Internet.

In the case of Rotten Tomatoes, the mob has slapped a score of 20-percent onto the cult classic of “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.” That’s unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as the fact that this sort of crowd-sourced criticism tricks you into viewing general consensus as absolute truth.

There are no checks and balances in this system, only the majority opinion.

Even on Twitter (or Facebook) it’s common, if not expected, to measure the quality of a tweet (or a photo) by how many retweets (or likes) the original garners.

In this way, majority approval in the virtual world—on Amazon, on Instagram, on Yelp, on YouTube, and so on—overshadows all other considerations and contributes to a collective psychology in which we agree to accept the most common opinion as the most correct one.

“Whoa there,” I can hear you saying. “Stop yelling. Surely you need to acknowledge the difference between a mob-ruled government (dangerous, pitchforks involved) and a mob-ruled website (harmless, all-caps involved).”

I agree, to a certain extent. Madison was considering some of the heaviest practicalities that any human being can consider. That’s why he contributed to the Constitution while I contribute to The Crimson.

However, I believe that my polemic against this follow-the-majority psychology has merit because such psychology, when shared by an entire society, deeply hurts the way that content is produced and consumed on the Internet.

I’ll begin with the producers—not only bloggers, moviemakers, and remote-control manufacturers, but also us, the great social-media generation.

Since all web users participate in a system that understands popularity as quality, we strive to garner as much positive attention as possible. We crop, tag, and caption our Facebook photos in exchange for crowd approval. We give our Crimson articles headlines such as “15 Amazing Thoughts about BuzzFeed” in order to grab more eyes.   

In effect we focus less on producing the best content than on producing the most popular content. Our need for majority appreciation results in self-censorship.