Life & Research Notes

A zen moment of modern performance art from choreographer Pina Bausch. Perfect surreal start to the week. Thanks mudd up.

I started following FFFFOUND back in mid-2007. I think I was a little late to the party even, but I admitted to being rocked by what I saw rolling through my reader. Yet the past several months I feel I’ve seen a noticeable decrease in quality of the primary feed, driven primarily by an over-diversification of content.

I was captivated in the beginning, not by the system itself (which is elegant and simple), but by the wonderful findings of the curation community. Now, as the audience has grown, so too has the range of tastes. And with an exponential network effect style growth, the site accelerates towards mediocrity. It’s a blurring rather than a sharpening.

So how does one found an open collective that grows intelligently in innovative directions rather than diffusing out in all directions amorphously? How does one maintain community uniqueness and personality while encouraging growth? FFFFOUND clearly had a creative seed group to set a precedent for content. But perhaps some of the base system rules are at fault: a weak identity/reputation, open invitations, weak positive reinforcement, and lack of negative reinforcement. The original community had no strong way to encourage newcomers in any particular direction. The precedent was not enforceable, thus it was lost.

It’s of course ironic that I became a member only a few months ago myself, so I am literally part of the problem. I still find gems by browsing around or following friends, so the site is not without value to me. It’s all a grand experiment, and I’m not sad by the shift so much as curious to watch as the site continues to expand, and to see how future community systems deal with these issues.BLJAT

Hooray for America occasionally being so awesome. Thank you VSL.