Sal's

Re: Bubbles, upvotes, web interlinking

Brace for metablogging. Sorry / not sorry.

I’m responding to two good posts I found this week:

Because I’m a proper smoothbrain, I never realized what the “bubbles” of bubbles.town refer to. The site’s footer currently reads, “Good stuff bubbles up.” As in, the “good” blog posts are made discoverable via upvotes.

Boy do I disagree. Using upvotes as a signal for “better” does not resonate with me at all. I’ve beaten around this bush in some of my earlier posts, but the ones linked above get right into it.

Re: convergence

Coyote and Brennan give admirable treatment to some of the problems with upvote-driven trending lists. One of them is what Coyote calls the problem of convergence. In other words, posts in these lists tend to talk about the same shit.

I assume that some of that convergence is due to well-intentioned bloggers independently coming to similar insights and conclusions. I have no problem with that. I may not be interested in reading the 142nd post about how RSS is cool, but I’m generally fine with these posts. I’m happy these bloggers are happy. (Also, RSS is cool.)

Some of it is from, in Brennan’s fine words, “the banal fields of metablogging.” Brennan then links to this post from Scholarch. I agree with Scholarch that it can be tiring to read the same sort of metablogging content over and over again. But I tend to avoid judging anyone else’s blogging proclivities, lest I be judged myself (<cough> my incessant text-editor posts </cough>).

And perhaps some convergence is driven by people trying to game the upvotes. I’ve seen others insist that’s true, but I can’t say for sure. If it is true, that’s lame. Isn’t this the sort of thing we’re trying to escape from out here in the indielands?

Whatever the reasons for the convergence, it gives these trending lists a quasi-LinkedIn vibe. I don’t like them.

Re: interlinking

On the positive side, I appreciate that Coyote and Brennan offer a great alternative to trending-post lists: links!

Coyote says,

Linking out to other blogs is the oldest way of making the blogosphere traversable. Not just blogrolls, button walls, and bookmarks, but link-rich text in the posts themselves as well, surfacing in feed readers and presenting long-time readers with new pathways to explore. If readers are not experiencing the blogs they follow as themselves a gateway to more blogs, then that’s an indicator of a lack of link culture.

And Brennan builds on this:

What we need is “link-rich text in the posts themselves,” to weave the thoughts of others with your own thoughts, and further enmesh the ideas from multiple people. Honestly, this doesn’t need to be complex, it can be as simple as giving a shout-out or acknowledgements, as Melo did in her most recent blog post.

My takeaways

If we add more links to other blogs and indie webstuffs into our posts, then we don’t need trending lists for discovery.

And if we can go the extra mile to not just linkdump, but to “weave” the ideas from those other pages into our own, all the better. (That said, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. A linkdump is a heck of a lot better than nothing!)

We have the technology. I’ll try harder to use it.

PS: If you haven’t already, go read Coyote’s and Brennan’s posts. They’re well worth your time.

Updates

Sylvia, who has built for us a highly cool website, wrote me a great email with some wise thoughts about these topics. Her thoughts helped refine my own. She also shared post that I want to add here: Melon’s Every site needs a Links Page.

There’s a simple test you can do to tell if a website is a positive citizen of the web, or a negative one. Go to the website and look for their links; do they have any? Does the website link to other websites made by other people? Or do they just link to their own social media? How many outbound links do they have?

…

Links are the lifeblood of the web, and linking to other sites is a declaration of independence. Its a declaration that says, “I am the infrastructure of the web, I am not content, nor am I a product, I am a human and a participant in this great work of humanity we call the Internet”.

I had to stop myself from quoting even more. Really good stuff in there. Thank you, Sylvia (and Melon)!

#Blogging #Upvotes