The Old Man and the Screen

Bearblog Trending is an echo chamber

TL;DR: trending is 90% the same 10 blogs (or wannabes) beating a dead horse and I prefer pissing in the wind.

Hindsight is 20/20 and of course, what else could a small likeminded community do but create an echo chamber out of their most liked posts?

I have touched on the Trending page/feed few times already:

I felt a weird fascination with the trending page, the concept for starts is great, surface what people on this platform like in a clean and simple way, and on that I think it delivers well, what it lacks is variety, and that is only partially down to implementation and mostly down to the size of the community.

I’m not sure how many bearblogs there are, but I’m sure the number of people liking/voting a post is some order of magnitude lower, I know that because I can see the number of likes/votes, and it’s hard to ever see a triple digit number, and then there is a long tail of low 20s and below that never gets to the feed.

What’s the result?
The same few blogs make it to the top, which hey, Pareto distribution is everywhere, but because the size of the community voting is so small and the cut-off so sharp, you end up with only those blogs (or blogs that want to be like those blogs).

Yes, yes, yes, some other people make it there too, and some genuine pearls sometimes, but the noise is just way off the scale compared to the signal.

Long post to say, it has been great, it has been wonderful, but the experiment of subscribing to the Trending page has come to an end, result: failed to deliver on quality over quantity.

I don’t want to be too harsh though, I’m sure plenty of people love this version of it (heck, the people that are voting surely are, right?) is just kind of boring and monotone after a while, at least for me.

Would I come back to subscribing? Only if I could filter out certain blogs and change the math a bit, but I don’t believe it will happen.

Oh well, see you next time.

#bearblog #trending