annoyatron: tumbleweed and crickets

How @Favstar is Ruining Funny

plaidlemur:

londes:

I realize this is not going to be a popular opinion.  A site like Favstar of Favrd can be an entertaining place to find new people or catch particularly funny tweets, but I’m here to tell you that, overall, it’s ruining the idea of humor on Twitter.

How it’s killing the fun:

1) It Makes Popularity a Commodity

Before, number of followers or the ratio people talk about was the only thing on which people could hang their hats.  Now, it is widely glorified by a rating for individual tweets and the most popular people have ever had, the number of popular tweets, “favstars,” etc.

2) It Causes You to Write for Your Gain First, Not to Entertain Others

I’m not saying you aren’t here to make connections, friends, and make others laugh.  What I am saying, is now there is an ulterior motive.  After you come up with something you think is especially funny, you don’t think about the other people reading it, you think about how many stars you’re getting and how quickly.  The focus has shifted back to you.

3) It Uses Poor Measurement

You can’t either like something or not like something.  That’s no way to measure humor.  If a ton of people find something slightly amusing it has a lot higher rating than something that made a few people laugh really hard.

4) It Creates Incentive to Star What You Don’t Find Funny

This plays off the basic human notion of acceptance and being mutual beneficial.  It’s why people think follower/followed ratio is important (it shouldn’t be).  Some people think unfollowing is a threat.  Some people will only follow me if I follow them back.  Favstar extends the problem: if you star me, I’ll star you back.  It’s my biggest problem with the system.

Take @debihope as an example. She’s given/received around 75K stars.  She’s starred all mine. I GUARANTEE YOU she hasn’t read them.  But she (or some computer program) does it because she gets stars back from everyone.  I mean, she’s all over the 100-star leaderboard, and… newsflash, she isn’t always that funny.  Sure, she’s clever, but half the stuff that goes up there gets auto-stars from so many people, and really doesn’t even deserve to make the 50-star board.

5) It Makes You Feel Like You Always Have to be Funny

My Twitter friend ended up leaving after she gained followers, feeling pressure to always be funny.  She’d post a few jokes that only garnished a couple stars, which is discouraging for anyone, and she ended up leaving.  So once people expect you to be funny, with the star system, you feel like you have to be funny all the time, and it doesn’t seem right to me.

Solution: I don’t friggin know. I’m more of a complainer than a solver.  But, I do think it would significantly helped if instead of giving out all the stars counting the same, the value of stars was weighted.  No more starslutting.  The more you give, the less they’re worth, and the opposite is also true.  That kind of solves #3 and #4.  I think the tension would decrease on the other 3 as well.  It would turn the game from churning out a lot of stuff and encouraging others to star all your tweets, to putting out less but higher quality, hopefully actually gauging what you find entertaining and making it a bit more fun.

That being said, I do enjoy reading all the tweets and have found some new people to follow using those systems, noticed tweets I have found exceptionally funny I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and I like seeing stars next to my name as much as the next guy.  I just think it has gone overboard commodicizing stars, and it’s tainting it.  It’s just my opinion.  Thoughts?

westintotheblack: Yes, ‘ruined’ is more attention-grabber than it is reality. I think I’d rather have it than not have it.  To your second point, while stars do come from Twitter, the reason people star is derived from Favstar.  Change the reason, and you change the behavior.  I doubt Favstar users are using stars as they were orignally designed by twitter: as a way to save your favorite tweets.

First, let me say that the subject of star aggregators (right term?) may be gauche to some people, and I understand the reluctance to want to talk about it—it can be both a bore and boorish. Yet (for those of us interested in anthropological stuff) the subculture and its intricacies, behaviors, and customs are quite fascinating.

Maybe that’s part of the problem: it has become a subculture with its own etiquette, taboos, rituals, idols, and goals.

You bring up some extremely interesting points which deserve exploration.

1) Whether it be stars or the number of followers, measuring an individual’s worth (your own, most especially) based on such standards is not healthy. It absolutely happens—I don’t think this can be avoided altogether, considering humans have an innate need to question their social standing, being social animals—yet there should be a conscious effort to focus on the actual human interaction, and whether you feel that you made people laugh, they made you laugh, or you brought knowledge, commiseration, or understanding to yourself or others. Stars and followers are a nice bonus, but they can’t compete with the little smile a nice reply, or a person’s silly joke gives me.

2) I don’t think I know how to approach this point, but I’m kind of an idiot, so I’ll try. I do check to see how many stars I get on my most recent tweets, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, or that I didn’t care. Those little avatars and profile pictures are people to me, however—they aren’t numbers. I assume that the people who starred that tweet smiled or laughed when they read the tweet. When I see certain individuals show up on every tweet from every person, it kind of hurts to know that they didn’t even read my joke (see your point number 4).

There are tons of different motivators for people making jokes on Twitter. One certainly would be to gain popularity, and the value of that is wholly subjective, and not for me to judge. I make jokes (and always have in my personal life) to get a reaction from people. I know this about me. I’m a youngest child, and amid the clamor of growing up I wanted my voice heard above the din and ‘intelligent’ conversation of my older siblings. Maybe being the youngest gave me more attention so I became addicted to it, but what ever the case, I received the most amount of attention with inappropriate humor.

3) This is absolutely true. Twitter is such a great medium to tell jokes—it’s quick, it reaches a ton of people, and the character limit forces the writer to think about the structure of the joke. A problem with it as a joke medium is the mechanism that has been re-purposed to be feedback is all or nothing, as you’ve written. There is something to be said for dichotomous feedback, in that it avoids the consternation that someone may feel in rating a joke on a more involved scale. However, your point is valid: the feedback mechanism is kind of wonky.

4) All I’ll say on this matter is that I hope that people that star my tweets actually read them and aren’t like the individual mention who cannot possibly read all the tweets they star. I like getting stars because it means that someone laughed (or smiled—or even admired the joke’s construction), not because they want a star back. That’s just really kind of gross.

I like making people laugh—it not only makes me feel good, but it also means I have some sort of an affect on others. I like the feeling of being heard, known, and appreciated.

5) That can be a trap. I see a lot of truth in that point.

Personally, I think Favrd and Favstar are phenomenal assets to the twitter world. The methods of rating, and the abuse of the systems are no doubt a problem for measuring the ‘amount’ of funny, and ranking tweets, but all of that is subjective anyway. However, without these sites, finding the majority of the people that I follow would have been a monumental task. I love my feed. The intelligence, humor, and little insights into people’s lives that I absorb are thanks to these sites. Without them, my feed would be much less entertaining, and probably not worth my participating in the Twitter world.