The Favrd Situation

I have more reason than most to appreciate Favrd. I’ve been fortunate enough to make friends with some of the most popular members of the Favrd Crowd and, as a direct result, I have a new career working with awesome people and doing something I enjoy. And thanks to the magic of Internet, I can live wherever I want. I’m incredibly lucky and immeasurably grateful to Dean for making that possible. So the end of Favrd makes me sad: something I love dearly has gone away. But I think I understand why it happened.

Stars and followers are a primitive form of reputation currency. I say primitive because there is no scarcity; I can give as many stars and follow as many people as I want, and I can easily create legions of false accounts to follow and star myself with.

When something has a real scarcity, you value it more when you have less of it. But for a currency without scarcity, like Twitter stars, the function is inverted: the more you spend, the less it’s worth to others. In particular, the less yours is worth, since this currency comes with a name attached. So if you want your opinion to matter, you don’t want to look like you award too many stars or follow too many people. It takes some experience to realize this, though, and not to be impressed by the 200 stars on a lunchtoot from the Jonas Brothers, or by a social media expert’s four-digit Followers count when it’s dwarfed by his five-digit Following count.

Simply put, I think what happened to Favrd was that a new crop of users appeared who didn’t know how to value the currency, and thus they inadvertently devalued it. I don’t think they meant any harm. They simply saw Favrd not as a means to interact with interesting and funny people, but as a shallow challenge to get the highest score. We were all playing that game too, no question, but we weren’t playing it the way they were. Not even close. They were arbitrarily plastering their stars around town to promote themselves, like “take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants.”

And it’s not a problem we can readily solve, at least not without closing our doors to outsiders or instituting some kind of application process. Cory Doctorow put it best in a talk I saw him give in 2005: All complex ecosystems have parasites. He was talking about DRM, but the concept applies here as well. As long as our community’s gates are open to all—and they probably have to be to avoid self-destruction—there will be people who don’t play right. Dean’s solution was to bulldoze the playground, which I guess is OK since we can still play in the empty lot, but the cost is that it’s going to be much harder to find new playmates.

I don’t know what to do about this. I like Favstar well enough, but it really replaces only those aspects of Favrd that were satisfying to validation junkies. I don’t see how a strong community can form around Favstar unless Tim makes it work more like Favrd did; a good start would be showing more than one page of recent tweets and adding a webcock filter. But I’m not sure a surrogate Favrd is the solution either.

Here’s one thing we can do, though: when you find something particularly funny, especially if it’s from someone not of the old crowd, do tell the author as Dean suggests, but also repost it using Twitter’s new-and-awesome Retweet feature, or Tumbl it so we can all see. People already do this on occasion, but I’d like to see more of it.

For now, though: thank you Dean. I hope whatever you build next brings you more pleasure, and that you’ll let us be a part of it.