Losing ffffocus?
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
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April 1st, 2008 at 4:13 pm
This reminds me an early analysis of Openstudio (http://openstudio.media.mit.edu/art/ff8080810f9c5797011009d0e0e002f5) by Kyle Buza. His work, “Evolution” illustrates a two-axis graphic showing network members against quality. But what is quality? I have asked this question once and still couldn’t find the answer yet. So it may be impossible to control what is quality over networks. I am not sure if we have rights to do it also.
I am a FFFFound user for more than half of a year and there is still no single filter available other than primary feed and there is no groups.
Since I look at FFFFound as a system for simple image bookmarking and not as a curated space for gems found, my expectatitons from it are not much. Helvetica or Swiss posters found all around FFFFound are simply to much for my taste. Needless to say same thing for big boobs photos.
I am not an active member of last.fm and my scrobler is 24 hours off these days but I know they have been investing highly on network-neighbours algoritms. So one can easily discover new territories without having to put out much. These ideas perhabs don’t solve the problem yet but at least FFFFound needs a tagging system and groups option as a very first thing.