langer:

Zach makes an important point about the evolution of personal publishing on the web…

I worry, too, about placing too much emphasis on this immediacy of approval and popular appeal, and the long-term effects of conditioning a generation of internet users to such a metric of success.

The latest dustup on Tumblarity has my fellow office-mate Langer saying that by boiling down our interactions to a single number we necessarily degrade those interactions. I’m not so sure.

Certainly MySpace was one of the first popular social networks to see a huge rise in emergent social gaming - to gain a friend just for the sake of the friend number. And every time I see another social media consultant I decry the devolving of an already pretty debased landscape of mostly useless additions to our collective consciousness.

But, are we not simply talking about what incentives a platform has set up for its users? First, it is naive to think that because there is not a number there are not games at play. We are social animals who crave respect, some take the short and shallow route and some take the longer route. But any of us who publish are essentially on that course.

So, the question really is, how hard would it be to devise a number which actually represents some measure of real, lasting, quality? Not hard at all I think.

Flickr’s “interestingness” for the most part actually captures decent photography, and isn’t easily gamed except with HDR photos and cute cats. More importantly, it actually encourages that for a user to get on the Explore page (their top leaderboard) the best path is to both take excellent photos, and then to write well thought out advice for other photographers. The number, in essence, actually captures positive intent.

The key is for those of us building communities to understand our role as social engineers. What we choose to highlight, and how we choose to do it, sets up a long chain of incentive systems that effects not just our community but our collective discourse as well.