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Discussion on: Social Lifespan of Posts

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

If I comment on a post that has substantially the same message - or a disagreement with - a post I've read before and can hunt down, then I sometimes reference that post in my comment.

In fact:

I'm conscious that people might take it as me criticising them for duplicating content, but I really mean it to help spread the discussion. If one post about, say, the Pythonic is garners a lot of interaction, while an existing one with more to say doesn't, then everyone's losing out.

It's a social problem in that popular (heavily followed, veteran) people can have their posts read a lot more than newcomers simply because they pop up in more people's feeds, and in turn they get more clicky action.

It's a time-of-day problem for some as well, where people post at a time convenient for them that might not coincide with a lot of readers being online.

And it's a popularity problem, too. I'm sure you've seen it happen, where people who have a lot of regular readers post something run-of-the-mill like, "what's your favourite text editor?" that ends up dominating the feed because it's easy to answer, never mind that it's asked multiple times per day and most people don't get any response.

There's some luck involved, some momentum of popularity, and some algorithms that we can influence.

I like the idea of bumping. I like the idea of related posts.
Something I also like is that perhaps the related posts could be partially algorithmic and also partly influenced by moderators. Where you get to rate the experience level of a post or suggest a tweet, you could also get to suggest a related post. Curation of content could really work!

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

That "popularity bias" may actually lend itself to a further feature of bumping: if an author bumps a post, it's shared to his or her followers in the same manner as posting! That way, if I really like an article by a newcomer, and I bump it, it automatically shows up in the notification area for my 15K followers.

I suppose that would make bumping not entirely dissimilar to "retweets", but that seems like a good thing. New and less popular authors gets promoted, and old posts resurrected periodically. Continued activity — comments, hearts/unicorns, bumping — by other users would then have a juggernaut effect, increasing the reach of otherwise obscure posts via notifications, feed ranking, and organic sharing.