The Consequences of Counting

(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.)

Every social media des­tin­a­tion has some sort of scoring mechanism:

• Twitter fol­lowers
• Linked-​​In contacts
• Facebook friends
• Blog subscribers/​comments

Those are the four I per­son­ally use most con­sist­ently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s hap­pening. They all have an equivalent.

What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is better always seems to be the sug­gested case: some­thing that’s very delib­er­ately designed into the UI is your score. Other people’s scores are almost always a click away.

For the owners of those products, it’s abso­lutely the case that bigger scores are great. The more people you’re con­nected with, the more time you’ll spend on the site, the more likely you’ll even­tu­ally click an advert or buy into the premium features, and the more trouble it is to move. For me, moving from Linked-​​In to a rival business network like E-​​cademy or Xing or Ryze would be a major pain.

The quality of the product doesn’t really matter, either, when the score’s at stake. Why do we use Twitter? It’s flakey and restrictive. Jaiku was way better than Twitter; there are up-​​and-​​coming com­pet­itors like identi.ca that offer way better features. Not to mention already dead com­pet­itors like Plurk. But my people are on Twitter and that’s why I put up with it. I have X fol­lowers there and X/​5 on its closest competitor.

The ludic (playful or game-​​like) element of social sites provide a massive incentive to stay and play. I was delighted to beat my high-​​score on Twitter yes­terday. That’s pretty childish, in most people’s estim­a­tion. No, actually it is childish: I should be ashamed of myself. And so it’s some­thing that sounds gauche when we admit to it. By-​​and-​​large, we don’t, unless we have no embar­rass­ment reflex.

But let’s talk about it.

I want to beat you at Twitter, Facebook and the rest. If your score is higher than mine, then I am jealous. If it is lower, then I scorn you. Why? Ummm dunno. Because it’s there. Frankly, because it’s designed like a game and in the same way I want to win our chess game that we might have one day, I want to win our Linked-​​In/​etc. game.

This is the secret dash­board on Linked-In/Twitter/&c:

So what would happen if I stopped playing? My rank on the kill­board would decline rapidly.

What does stopping playing mean on these sites? Not visiting; not accepting any friend requests that simply boost the friend count; not joining in on dis­cus­sions where I know – or suspect — there’s no real chal­lenge to estab­lished points of view.

Would I have fewer friends? – possibly. Would the things I said and did be less right? No. [My job role as a pub­lisher clearly means that reach is a KPI. That kind of taints what I might do as a real human being. ;-) ]

The other con­sequence of the ludic nature of social sites is the effect of that on people’s beha­viour, as I’ve talked about over the last couple of posts. If it looks like a game, and playing it like a game offers some rewards, then of course people will do that. If the game is approval, and it is in many cases, then that will lead to approved beha­viour. Scoring systems on social media des­tin­a­tions are nearly always linked to approval in some way. The other part of the game is com­pet­i­tion – you have to have a better comment than the other guy. That’s really great in some ways, because it makes people reach for ideas. Really terrible in other ways, because des­troying the oppos­i­tion becomes the focus. Thus the phe­nomenon of the Angry Internet Man – a great phrase possibly coined but def­in­itely pop­ular­ised by the awesome gaming site RockPaperShotgun.

This is a little way off from the Foucault post, in some ways, but it leads to the same con­clu­sion. Social media may well be a force for good, cre­ativity, innov­a­tion. But at the same time it is also exerting control and per­verting behaviours.

PS. I think last.fm and similar taste-​​based networks have dif­ferent dynamics, but that’s one for another day.

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• Facebook as Game
• YASNS?*
• Twittiquette