This is in response to funsizebytes, who was responding trixieboots’ (which was reblogged by favstar) response to favrd’s shutdown and various other issues you could quantify as “the value of stars on Twitter and its sub-communities.” It’s well worth it to read the posts both for interestingness and context. I’ve snipped a fair amount.
I’ve been very uncomfortable about the conversations on Twitter and Tumblr around starring and Favrd’s demise, and I wanted to contribute in a way that I hope will be constructive. These discussions seem to boil down to questions about the value and meaning of the star, and while on one level this strikes me as a painfully petty issue for human beings to be nasty to each other about, it nonetheless points to what I think is a more fundamental fissure in the Twitter community.
Right away I need to point out that there isn’t “a” Twitter community. There are many of them, and they might overlap, but it’s a mistake to talk about them as one group….
I suspect that what you mean is the “Favrd/Favstar sub-section of the Twitter community” (and, even then, there’s not one cohesive “whole”.)
This is, in my opinion, unnecessarily stating the obvious. Twitter is, in fact, “a” community that itself contains countless smaller communities, which is what you say in the last paragraph above but contradicts what you say in the first paragraph by means of trying to correct her.
Sociologists and communications scholars have long observed that masculine discursive modes emphasize competition and the assertion of strengths, while feminine modes work toward community-building and the establishment of common ground….
Men are competitive and women like community? But this isn’t sexism because it’s science. ::eyeroll::
She actually didn’t say that it’s women vs. men — she said “masculine” vs. “feminine.” Men and women can have distinct qualities that do not uniformly conform to their gender or even sexual orientation. She’s speaking of ways to view the dynamics of conversation. There are certainly differences in conversational patterns and means of acceptance among men and women. To chalk up her statement to a perception of sexism is to either ignore her words or ignore much of human psychology.
It’s a false dichotomy. I’ve met plenty of people who knew me through Favrd and we’ve become friends. I’m not competing with Sween for followers or stars. It’s not as if Sween getting stars or followers means that I can’t get them.
The leaderboard was a competition, but that isn’t all Favrd was. Favrd was a common ground. It was a place to see old friends and meet new ones.
Sporting competition is the competition of preclusion — if one football team gets points, among other things it means that the other team doesn’t get points. Favrd and other starring systems that have grown out of Twitter are — and forgive me because I’m not good at remembering official academic terms for things — a competition of plurality. Any member of the community can star any other member of the community. So, as dwineman has pointed out, the currency always runs the risk of devaluation but it also, in my opinion is what allowed favrd to become such a fertile ground for friendship and creative exploration — in other words, a real, vibrant community.
Not to mention that when we’re talking about stars and Favrd/Favstar, we’re not talking about “communication” in any regular sense of the word. If you want conversation, @replies/mentions and DMs are Twitter’s communication methods.
I’m not sure how a star isn’t communication. It may be shorthand in a broader community that sometimes seems entirely built on shorthand, but the “seal of approval” that it can provide — or, conversely, the “I was here” stamp that it came to mean for some of the members of the community — is certainly a non-verbal form of communication.
These two competing understandings of the star manifest a tension between two broader, culturally constructed modes of communicating: one that values discourse as a form of competition and another that values discourse as a mode of community-building.
Stars are not “discourse”.
Discourse can be accomplished on Twitter via @replies or DMs.
(Just because you can use a wrench as a hammer doesn’t make it a good hammer.)
And just because a hammer was made for nails doesn’t mean that it cannot and should not take on uses that its inventor never intended.
What troubles me is the apparent emergence of systemic enforcement—by bullying, belittling, or blacklisting—of one system of value over another. To claim that starring in reciprocity is “bad” is to rehearse the superiority of a masculinist discourse that values competition over community-building. Even more problematic is the blind recital of this hierarchy as though it were natural, universal, and implicit.
Dan Wineman answered the original post with this:
Pardon my elitism, but following someone is what you do “for being them.” If you star everything someone says, how does that mean anything?
If your community relies on “reciprocity” where everyone has to validate everything that you say every time you say it, you have a pretty weak excuse for a community.
Blind recital of hierarchy is bad, but unthinking reciprocity of stars is good?
You’re making an illogical leap of understanding. She’s not saying that reciprocity is bad. She’s saying that treating people differently for their adherence to this style of reciprocity is bad. She’s saying that “we” have no right to claim a moral high ground because our way of doing something is different from somebody else’s (not hers).
In the current debate, these two divergent value systems have come into explicit and public conflict, and I think this moment raises important questions about Twitter’s capacity to accommodate the diverse values of its own users. Will it be a space that thoughtlessly replicates the discursive hierarchies that have organized so many other modes of cultural conversation, or will it prove to be flexible and responsive to the disparate voices from which it is constituted?
That’s all very impressive and academic sounding, but you’re conflating Favrd/Favstar with Twitter; equating “conversation” with stars (when there are tools and methods of communication which work much better); and criticizing a website (and those who used it) which was established for the purpose of finding a particular kind of post (funny ones) which was shut down after a new group of people came in and insisted that everything they said be considered worthy of inclusion.
Twitter has plenty of room for all sorts of different types of people to use it however they want.
To use academic terms, Favrd (particularly, the leaderboard) was the “honors class” for those who has earned there way into it by meeting the qualifications (being funny).
What eventually happened was that another group came in and insisted that they be allowed in the class, and worked the system so that each member of their group would be included, and each one would, in turn, keep the other ones there.
Here is where you and I differ most, for several reasons. First, the “reciprocity” crowd is not a new phenomenon. It has existed on favrd virtually from the start. You mentioned yourself in a previous post that pretty far back you dealt with users who would follow/unfollow constantly and then berate you for calling them out on it. Others would star, star, star, or call out people publicly for not following them, or followfriday the entire leaderboard in hopes of working the system and moving up the leaderboard. Basically they would do whatever it took except the one thing that mattered most: create good content. Luckily, the community was still relatively small so the “good” people were able to root out the “bad” people. Some were even converted and were active participants to the end. In my opinion, the problem became worse as time went on mostly because of the scale issues to which Dean alluded: mo’ people equals mo’ problems — but not exclusively so.
Second, numerous arguments in support of Dean’s decision to pull the plug seem to come back to this thought of the “original crowd” vs. these young upstarts who have no respect for the system. It may be true in part, but it also smacks of the rigidity and relative sameness of the system that’s in place. I got (and, arguably, caused) a lot of shit for pointing out back in August that there was a tweetup in Boston that had more than its share of white guys (an observation that, regretfully, some interpreted as my calling the group racist and sexist, which made as much sense to me as Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist) — furthermore, more than its share of people in general who are either computer programmers or otherwise make a living from the Internet/IT/Creative avocations (I’m one of those, by the way). They’re almost all amazing, talented people who deserved and continue to deserve the adulation that they receive from old and new favrd participants and Twitter users alike. However, it is my strong personal opinion that too much of the same in any social setting is exclusionary and creatively monochromatic, whether intended or not. That’s a problem bigger than the Internet because, even almost two decades along, it still skews homogeneous. But it’s less and less a problem on Twitter and, by extension, it was becoming less of a problem on favrd. In fact, I agree with what Adam Isacson said about favrd’s shutdown:
Dean’s message seems to indicate that this thriving site has somehow managed to tie itself in horrible knots. I missed that completely; it seemed just as vital as it did the day I followed the link in that @ reply.
Personal things had encroached on my time and active participation in favrd the past few months, but as I started to get more time, I found a whole new batch of faces on favrd, some who were tricking the system just like others before them and some who were incredibly funny in whole new ways. It was refreshing. Now it’s gone.
The one difference is that the little facewalls under every name were a lot larger. But, if you believe in the basic tenets of crowdsourcing, as I do, you could see that the people at the top still, over time, “earned” their way up there. There was more noise, but you could still get a strong signal without coming close to the unbearable amount of effort that has been implied.
Also, with all of the fantastic strides that were made to keep out webcocks in the beginning, and with the user patterns of the “reciprocity” group so seemingly easy to pick out in hindsight, you would think that it would have been easy to keep this group out of favrd and keep favrd more “pure” to its original intent based solely on their user behavior and thereby avoid any personal judgements.
Ironically, Dean’s parting message on Favrd:
Just an idea: next time you see something you like, write the person who made it a note telling them so. Even better, explain why.
…would go a lot further along towards building a meaningful community than a system of reciprocal stars ever could.
I’m sure Dean doesn’t doubt the sincerity of his Oppenheimer-esque mea culpa. But it’s just a little condescending to to tell a group of people who have already been sending each other notes of encouragement virtually for the entire existence of the application you created that they’re not doing it right because you’ve seen the user data and you know the truth. Conversely, if you mean it only to those who were doing it wrong, don’t make such a blanket statement.
Imagine if we applied this new reciprocity system to movie reviews. Imagine Roger Ebert setup a website where people could post a “thumbs up” vote for a movie they liked. At the end of each day, the movies with the highest number of stars would be shown on a page of results. A movie with 50 favorable votes is excellent. A movie with 20 favorable votes is pretty good. A movie with only 10 votes might be very good but not many people had seen it, but since it received 10 votes by people who really loved movies, maybe you’d go check it out.
People might come together around that website, and bond around not only about the movies which are on each day’s list, but other topics as well. It served its original purpose (finding good movies) but a community happened as well.
Now along comes a group of people who come to the site and they all agree that whenever someone puts out a movie, they’ll vote it up.
Suddenly the reviews are meaningless. Everything gets 50 votes.
These newcomers flood the message boards with rants about how unfair the system is and how elitist it is.
You want this to be interpreted as an act of solidarity and community building.
The end result is that what had been a community no longer exists.
This model is similar to the way that Rotten Tomatoes works, except without the self-destruction. In fact, favrd could have done well to adopt some of the methods for weighting scores that RT has. I’m not anti-class — I’m just against the notion of trying out a one-size-fits-all model and then throwing up your hands when that doesn’t work.
If you want to build a mutual admiration society, go ahead. No one will stop you. But you took over the Improv, turned it into a Starbucks, and now want me to believe that a coffee shop is a better than a comedy club because “competition” is a symptom of a male dominated society and now we can have “community.”
Sounds an awful lot like you want to “civilize” us. Ask your sociologist friends how that usually turns out.
It typically doesn’t turn out well, whether it’s transcendentalism or anarcho-syndicalism or kibbutzes or U.S. urban decay or MySpace. But you seem to be attempting to assert that favrd made a direct leap from uptopian ideal to lost cause without any stops in-between. I’m totally willing to admit that I misinterpreted you, but that’s certainly the argument that Dean made on Zeldman’s site. The two unifying threads of all of these past “honor classes” are that somebody encroaches in a way that forces the originators to confront their existence and, rather than staying and fighting for what they believe in, they let themselves be overrun or they move on to the next exclusive, homogeneous utopia, which is too bad.
When I upload video from my iPhone it seems to be hosted directly by tumblr. But when I upload from my laptop it still goes through Vimeo and takes forever to process. Super.
Holy f*****’ s***! I can feel my f*****’ brain cells dying as I’m watching but I f*****’ can’t f*****’ stop watching.
“Please calm down, the music and everything. It’s nice that I went and bought me an outfit today that costed a lot of money today, you know what I mean? ‘Cause I figured that Wu-Tang was gonna win. I don’t know how you all see it, but when it comes to the children, Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children. You know what I mean? Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best, Okay? I want you all to know that this is ODB, and I love you all. Peace!” — Ol’ Dirty Bastard, interrupting Shawn Colvin’s performance at the 1998 Grammy Awards after the Wu-Tang Clan lost to Puff Daddy for “Best Rap Album.” On one hand, it’s pretty damn hilarious. On the other hand, it makes slightly more sense when you read that the night before the Grammys, ODB helped save a 4-year-old girl from a car accident outside of his studio and continued to check on her in the hospital under an alias until the media picked up on it. Thanks, Wikipedia.
This note from inmi got me thinking again about something I’ve been mulling. My old iPhone is being used almost exclusively as a remote control for our AppleTV now and I was thinking of trying out a few apps for the boy. He’s almost 3 years old, which may still be too young, but he’s pretty much a pro at finding the videos he wants on iTunes and AppleTV now, so I thought if there is anything that might work some cognitive thinking into his motor skills, why not go for it?
So, anyone tried any apps for youngish young ‘uns?
Never forget.
I once forgot that I had my windows down on the first really nice day of spring and didn’t realize it until I had gotten through the chorus of “Fuck and Run” at a traffic light and looked over to see a family staring at me, aghast, from the very open windows of their Prius.
Luckily the light changed before I had time to smile at them.
People who own Priuses don’t have, nor do they understand, sex.
Signed,
A Prius Owner
The Physics of Ali
My hero.
q’est que c’est “sweet science”?
