The Reader Appreciation Project

If you agree that your fellow blogger is not your competitor, then what’s the origin of this need for rankings and hierarchies which makes us develop ranking tools for (maybe) intentionally left unranked services? Yes, this is about the urge of improving StumbleUpon, by putting together a ranking tool which gives users the possibility to see the top 100 StumbleUpon members, ranked by several criteria, such as number of stumbles, number of fans, or number of videos.

Ranking instruments can be highly motivational, people trying to figure out ways to become one of the top members of such communities. Some of them misunderstand the meaning of owning the community, making a hobby out of adding friends to their account only to spam them beg for their attention afterwards.

What are social networking sites? Thanks to Lyndon Antcliff, who was kind enough to post this paper on social networking sites to Sphinn, we can find out that

We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

No word about articulating a list of Power Users of the service. (May this be the reason why the post stalled two days until hitting the front page of Sphinn? Or maybe that’s just because it goes in deep details, spread on several pages – too much for this world in a never ending rush)

Again, coming back to blogging and readers, a recognized sign of appreciation is to display the Top Commenters list. Readers appreciate the feature, and some of them may even search for such blogs with good PR and low number of comments, so they can easily make it to the top. On very popular blogs, they spend hours every day, trying to conquer and maintain one of the top positions.

Is it true that playing only for the sake of the game is not giving enough motivation to keep us moving? If we strive hard to achieve, it may occur that we forget to enjoy the journey. Why would somebody want to be called a Top Stumbler? Will his stumbling experience be enriched by this tag? One of the most beautiful things of StumbleUpon was exactly the lack of hierarchy, the feeling of a community where no member is better than the others, where the idea of “better” applied only to web pages, or photos, or videos, not to persons, where you could send your friends a page without worrying that they might think you are a spammer (because the whole idea of StumbleUpon is to show web pages to its members).

Now, when we know there is a top, will my friends think that I’m sending them pages only because I want to be on the list? Maybe not, but I still have this feeling that StumbleUpon was a better place before being discovered by internet marketing experts. At least, it was for me. What are your thoughts about this?