blackbeardblog:

Here’s an interesting blog post taking about the future of social sharing - in particular identifying “sharing fatigue” on particular networks and asking why this happens.

The post suggests it’s because for most the rewards of sharing don’t grow and evolve over time - reminding me of the situation you see in games where routine tasks start off as fun but turn into grinding once you’re used to them: the initial tiny rewards of sharing wear off rapidly.

Except in games the answer is to increase the level of challenge, which isn’t the case for social networks. Most users, as the post says, want sharing to be rewarding but they also want it to stay easy.

What can sites - and content owners, who rely on people being keen to share - do about this? Make more shareable content, blah blah. But making sharing more rewarding while keeping it easy chimes with other trends too. Frictionless sharing - the automation of sharing content - is the logical endpoint of making sharing easy. How about making it rewarding?

Well, sharing is rewarding when what you share reaches the right people and gets a reaction - so targeting content seems one way to go. But, says this report, very few users bother sorting friends into subgroups even when given the opportunity. Which is why computer-curated sharing - where the targeting is done for you - is likely to get more and more prevalent. Personally I don’t like the idea, but I think the argument here is fairly solid.

There’s a third reason for “sharing fatigue”, though, which ties in with the flurry of Pinterest interest. Sharing fatigue seems to be tied into particular sites - the novelty wears off after a bit and the service fades into the background. So changing the frame - joining a new social network and playing around with it - can spark new interest among jaded social sharers. That’s one explanation for the ebb and flow of different social services and the nomadic nature of digital culture.

Tom, this sentence baffles me, and that’s because it sets up a false parallel, as if “challenging” and “easy” were referring to the same sort of thing: “Except in games the answer is to increase the level of challenge, which isn’t the case for social networks. Most users, as the post says, want sharing to be rewarding but they also want it to stay easy.”

That I want it to be easy to share content doesn’t mean I want people to only share easy content. So if I want to share a game with you, I want to easily share the game; but that doesn’t mean I want the game to be easy. Or think of kids who like to go out drag racing, if that’s still a thing among kids: they may want it to be easy to organize the road race, and to get there, but that doesn’t mean they want it to be easy for anyone to win the road race. “Social media” and “social networks” aren’t analogous to “games.” The road race is a game, or a contest, anyway. But the road itself isn’t a game, or a contest, even if you may want to pick the stretch of road most suitable for your race. [EDIT: “Social media” and “social networks” aren’t analogous to each other, either, which is another confusion in your post. See parenthesis at the end of this post.]

Your original analogy is quite useful. Not that social networks are like games, but that in some ways social interchange can provide emotional and intellectual rewards in the way that games do. What keeps us coming back to a game — to a certain kind of game, anyway — is a sense of meeting an enjoyable challenge while being provided good feedback along the way as to how we’re doing, so we are continually able to master challenges that are new enough not to be boring but that, since they share enough features with challenges we’ve already encountered, make us confident we’ll be able to figure out a way to move forward. Games (some games, not all) often do this formally, with rules and rewards built in. Most social interchange isn’t and can’t be as rigid or formal. So the challenges and rewards are more ad hoc, and have to come from the community. To my mind, my rock critic/musicwrite world does a generally horrible job of this, but such horribleness isn’t written into the enterprise. The problem is a matter of not noticing challenges and not knowing how to reward oneself and one’s fellows along the way, how to sustain oneself long before the questions have been answered and the challenges met. But the fact that people in their leisure and fan activities are able to enjoy raising the difficulty of games, of dancing, of mountain climbing, means that this impulse isn’t foredoomed to collapse the moment the activity turns intellectual. It does collapse here, in my world, but that’s because people don’t know what to do, and are unwilling to pause and say, “How can we change this, since it isn’t working?” And for many of them it is working, if only half adequately, leaving a restlessness and a seeking of new input but no ability to find and create and enjoy actual challenges as they appear. But again, this is a task for a community, to learn how to enjoy thinking, and there’s nothing a Tumblr or a Facebook or a Livejournal can put into its design that can do a community’s job for it.

(Btw, a platform like Tumblr (if platform is the right term) isn’t itself a social network, even if in some other ways it’s a network. The highway system is a network, the phone system is a network, but neither is a social network. There’s often this confusion in writing about “social media” as to what sort of network one is talking about. Social networks are connections between people, and the same social network can have people communicating using a number of different technologies (e.g., mouths, clothing).)