Steal Your Abs

One thing I have grown to dislike is FriendFeed’s list of suggested users. Twitter has one too and I’ll talk about that later. Here’s a conversation about FriendFeed’s list and the effects it is having on building a rich community.

Here’s how that list is picked. It is a list that’s made up of the most popular users on FriendFeed. You can see a list of FriendFeed’s most popular users here.

“But Scoble you’re #1, so you must LOVE that list, right?”

Wrong. I hate it. Before telling you why, let me explain that you only see this list as a new user. After you sign onto FriendFeed it shows you a different list: made up of the most popular people your friends have already followed. I hate that one too.

“Why do you hate it Scoble? Get to the point!”

This list reduces engagement numbers. It reinforces people who were already popular. Everyone on this list has built an audience somewhere else before FriendFeed came along.

It communicates that if you don’t also have a media property (ie, a TV show, a radio show, a blog, etc) that you don’t matter and that you’ll never get to the top of FriendFeed’s pile.

That just sucks.

Even worse, most of these people don’t participate in FriendFeed and if they do it’s a handful of comments a month.

Compare that list to this one, which shows FriendFeed’s most active users.

But really even that list sucks, because lots of people on it are very noisy and don’t bring a lot of meat to the table.

So, we go looking for better lists? Wefollow is interesting, but is based on popularity again (which is gamed because Twitter’s list is even worse than the FriendFeed one) even though people have to pick the lists they’ll be identified with, which is dramatically better than the FriendFeed and Twitter Suggested User List. Alltop is my favorite place for finding new people to listen to (plus it’s not just for finding Twitter users like Wefollow is).

I find that when I find someone on AllTop that my engagement with that person goes way up. Yes, there’s still an influence of popularity here (you usually won’t get on AllTop without being good, which almost always means having an audience, since being good generally grabs a crowd around you) but it isn’t the overwhelming thing that gets you there.

The other thing bad about these lists?

They can be used to artificially create stars and penalize people who don’t behave the way the company wants you to behave at worst (here’s some evidence of that), and at best it just continues the A-list making it very difficult to break onto the top of the list and/or for new people to get heard. Which is why I like the AllTop approach much better.

So, why do I call these lists “anti-community?” Because it creates jealousy/envy and division between those who are on the list and those who are not. It also creates pressure to game the system to get onto such lists and if you are on the list it creates pressure to keep doing stuff to make sure you stay on the list.

Now, lots of people will say that they are above the list and don’t care about them. Well, I don’t believe them for one and for two even for people who don’t care they are still affected by the other members who do buy into these lists and start changing their behaviors for the list. I’ve noticed a few Twitterers who became less likely to write personal Tweets after they got on this list and learned that large audiences were listening. That is anti-community behavior that these lists encourage.

Anyway, at best these lists get A-list bloggers to write about your service. I’ll be honest, in early days I liked the list on FriendFeed because it recognized that I brought a large audience to it. But today? They are rewarding people who aren’t helping the service grow.

So, dear FriendFeed, get rid of the list and put something like AllTop in its place. That will help you a lot more even though it personally will hurt me.

UPDATE: at least FriendFeed’s list is done algorithmically and is fairly applied as it comes to popularity. Twitter’s list is done by humans and is not fairly applied and causes even worse distortions.

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