Meow Meow Beenz
Ever since discovering the “profile rating” number in the profiles at LiveJournal, I've been quietly charting my daily worth as calculated by the secret algorithm in a spreadsheet. I can't help feeling a little like Jeff Winger in the “Meow Meow Beenz” episode of Community.
Within a day or two, it became obvious that the profile rating algorithm rewards interaction above all else – you want to know how I know that? Because I would have done the same damn thing. I built a prototype social network a couple of years ago, and added a “Kudos” number to people's profile cards – which essentially added their public posts, comments received, and likes received over the past 7 days. If you stopped posting, or your posts stopped receiving feedback, your number dropped – which encouraged you to interact in order to attract others to your stuff.
So yeah. Jeff Winger. In the Meow Meow Beenz episode of Community, the college takes part in the beta programme of a new mobile phone app that allows people to rate each other – with the aggregated recent score becoming your “rating” as a person. It's a hilarious take-down of the entire social network phenomenon, and describes every lord-of-the-flies situation we have ever seen online in the space of one twenty minute episode. The highly rated people become an exclusive oligarchy, while the lower rated cannot escape their “class”. Winger sets out to exploit the system, and quickly ascends to the exclusive club before tearing it to pieces around him.
I can't help feeling the same about anybody that “plays the game” online. Marketers are the most obvious culprits – just this morning I had an actress start following me on Twitter. I looked at her profile – she was following several thousandpeople. Idiot. It's not just marketers though – some people obviously chase the numbers too.
Maybe if I didn't have a job that often resembles a black hole, and a crazy home life filled with washing up and children, I too would sit each night writing posts and commenting into the early hours – putting the work in to ascend the imaginary ranks – to become a “somebody”.
I guess the danger of becoming a somebody, is you also become a target. While sitting out here in the quiet back-waters of the internet, writing this garbage, I can pretty much get away with saying anything. If this rubbish becomes popular, the game will change.