Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Competition and Community

This is in response to trixieboots’s post which was reblogged by Favstar.

I don’t know who “Trixieboots” is on twitter or tumblr and haven’t read anything beyond this one post.

I’ve been very uncomfortable about the conversations on Twitter and Tumblr around starring and Favrd’s demise, and I wanted to contribute in a way that I hope will be constructive. These discussions seem to boil down to questions about the value and meaning of the star, and while on one level this strikes me as a painfully petty issue for human beings to be nasty to each other about, it nonetheless points to what I think is a more fundamental fissure in the Twitter community.

Right away I need to point out that there isn’t “a” Twitter community. There are many of them, and they might overlap, but it’s a mistake to talk about them as one group.

For example, the folks I follow as @luomat and the folks I follow as @tj make up two almost entirely separate Twitter communities (tech geeks and funny folks although obviously there is some overlap). But those are only a couple of hundred out of hundreds of thousands of users.

I suspect that what you mean is the “Favrd/Favstar sub-section of the Twitter community” (and, even then, there’s not one cohesive “whole”.)

Sociologists and communications scholars have long observed that masculine discursive modes emphasize competition and the assertion of strengths, while feminine modes work toward community-building and the establishment of common ground. What I see in the debate over the value-system of starring is a conflict between these two fundamentally different modes not only of communicating but of understanding what communication is for.

Men are competitive and women like community? But this isn’t sexism because it’s science. ::eyeroll::

It’s a false dichotomy. I’ve met plenty of people who knew me through Favrd and we’ve become friends. I’m not competing with Sween for followers or stars. It’s not as if Sween getting stars or followers means that I can’t get them.

The leaderboard was a competition, but that isn’t all Favrd was. Favrd was a common ground. It was a place to see old friends and meet new ones.

Not to mention that when we’re talking about stars and Favrd/Favstar, we’re not talking about “communication” in any regular sense of the word. If you want conversation, @replies/mentions and DMs are Twitter’s communication methods.

These two competing understandings of the star manifest a tension between two broader, culturally constructed modes of communicating: one that values discourse as a form of competition and another that values discourse as a mode of community-building.

Stars are not “discourse”.

Discourse can be accomplished on Twitter via @replies or DMs.

(Just because you can use a wrench as a hammer doesn’t make it a good hammer.)

What troubles me is the apparent emergence of systemic enforcement—by bullying, belittling, or blacklisting—of one system of value over another. To claim that starring in reciprocity is “bad” is to rehearse the superiority of a masculinist discourse that values competition over community-building. Even more problematic is the blind recital of this hierarchy as though it were natural, universal, and implicit.

Dan Wineman answered the original post with this:

Pardon my elitism, but following someone is what you do “for being them.” If you star everything someone says, how does that mean anything?

If your community relies on “reciprocity” where everyone has to validate everything that you say every time you say it, you have a pretty weak excuse for a community.

Blind recital of hierarchy is bad, but unthinking reciprocity of stars is good?

In the current debate, these two divergent value systems have come into explicit and public conflict, and I think this moment raises important questions about Twitter’s capacity to accommodate the diverse values of its own users. Will it be a space that thoughtlessly replicates the discursive hierarchies that have organized so many other modes of cultural conversation, or will it prove to be flexible and responsive to the disparate voices from which it is constituted?

That’s all very impressive and academic sounding, but you’re conflating Favrd/Favstar with Twitter; equating “conversation” with stars (when there are tools and methods of communication which work much better); and criticizing a website (and those who used it) which was established for the purpose of finding a particular kind of post (funny ones) which was shut down after a new group of people came in and insisted that everything they said be considered worthy of inclusion.

Twitter has plenty of room for all sorts of different types of people to use it however they want.

To use academic terms, Favrd (particularly, the leaderboard) was the “honors class” for those who has earned their way into it by meeting the qualifications (being funny).

What eventually happened was that another group came in and insisted that they be allowed in the class, and worked the system so that each member of their group would be included, and each one would, in turn, keep the other ones there.

When I see people who are posting about “Help Person A get their first [X]-star tweet!” that isn’t discourse. Is it “community building”? Not in any meaningful sense. Recommending someone via “Follow Friday” could potentially build a community. Soliciting a bunch of strangers to click an ajax button isn’t building community.

Again, building a sense of community around a system of implied, expected reciprocity seems to be the most meaningless version of the word “community” that I can think of. It is the definition of the “circle jerk” that many of the “old school” Favrd-folks were accused of.

Ironically, Dean’s parting message on Favrd:

Just an idea: next time you see something you like, write the person who made it a note telling them so. Even better, explain why.

…would go a lot further along towards building a meaningful community than a system of reciprocal stars ever could.

Please don’t mistake this for not understanding your point, or being all wrapped up in the masculine mindset and thinking it is the superior/only way. I get your argument, I just don’t agree with it as accurate.

Imagine if we applied this new reciprocity system to movie reviews. Imagine Roger Ebert setup a website where people could post a “thumbs up” vote for a movie they liked. At the end of each day, the movies with the highest number of stars would be shown on a page of results. A movie with 50 favorable votes is excellent. A movie with 20 favorable votes is pretty good. A movie with only 10 votes might be very good but not many people had seen it, but since it received 10 votes by people who really loved movies, maybe you’d go check it out.

People might come together around that website, and bond around not only about the movies which are on each day’s list, but other topics as well. It served its original purpose (finding good movies) but a community happened as well.

Now along comes a group of people who come to the site and they all agree that whenever someone puts out a movie, they’ll vote it up.

Suddenly the reviews are meaningless. Everything gets 50 votes.

These newcomers flood the message boards with rants about how unfair the system is and how elitist it is.

You want this to be interpreted as an act of solidarity and community building.

The end result is that what had been a community no longer exists.

If you want to build a mutual admiration society, go ahead. No one will stop you. But you took over the Improv, turned it into a Starbucks, and now want me to believe that a coffee shop is a better than a comedy club because “competition” is a symptom of a male dominated society and now we can have “community.”

Sounds an awful lot like you want to “civilize” us. Ask your sociologist friends how that usually turns out.