Sal’s

Re: Bubbles, upvotes, web interlinking

Responding to two good posts I found this week:

Because I’m a proper smoothbrain, I never realized what the “bubbles” of bubbles.town refers 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. (Also, RSS is cool.)

Some of it is from, in Brennan’s 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>).

But there is one type of post I will judge. Some of the same-sameness is driven by people trying to game the upvote system. I’m not going to link to anyone here because I can’t pretend to know what people’s motivations are. But to those of you who are crafting your posts around upvotes … I’m embarrassed for you. Isn’t this the sort of B.S. we’re all trying to get away from out here in the indielands?

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, asserting the value of going beyond merely posting linkdumps:

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.

#blogging #upvotes
#blogging #upvotes