Tumblarity and Quantified Stand-ins for Social Status
Posted: May 12th, 2009 | Author: alicetiara | Filed under: Dissertation, social media, Status | Tags: tumblr status dissertation | 7 Comments »So Tumblr launched its Tumblarity index last week. (Here’s Gawker’s obnoxious take.)
Tumblarity is a metric that measures one’s popularity, or degree of Tumblr-ness, depending on who you ask. It’s displayed on a nifty stats page modeled after The Feltron Report. Tumblr hasn’t revealed exactly what it uses to calculate this number, but it certainly includes number of posts, followers, likes, and reblogs. My Tumblarity is 3 (which is very, very sad, in case you’re wondering), but if it were higher, I could see where I rank in the top 50,000 Tumblogs or in my local area.
I stole this image from download squad so you can see what a slightly better Tumblarity score looks like:
Like number of Twitter followers, Tumblarity is a quantified metric: a number that stands in for more complex social phenomena, like popularity or status. Tumblr helpfully includes leaderboards to make it extra-easy to compare Tumblarity with your friends, rivals, and frenemies, causing tech dorks pundits to complain about the “popularity contest” aspect of the feature.
A few basic things about quantified metrics:
1) They are always stand-ins for more complicated status measures. A single number cannot possibly convey the nuances involved in social status and social hierarchy (e.g. Why do so many people read your Tumblr? What group/subculture/community does it appeal to? What actions do you take to maintain this status? What does your community value that your blog provides?).
2) Techie/geek/engineer types love quantified metrics precisely because they facilitate comparison. Several of my informants talked about how Silicon Valley types love talking about VC funding and valuation because they allow people to attach clear numbers to companies in order to rank them (and convey status on their CEOs, VCs, and employees). (See also those obnoxious “30 under 30,” “100 Most Influential People in SV,” ranking lists.)
Clearly, people in general also like comparative metrics — see the high score lists at arcades, the Fortune 500, the Best Dressed list, etc.– but they’re becoming increasingly prevalent in social software (built by nerds).
3) Quantified status metrics spur competition and therefore increase user action. I’m assuming Tumblr is trying to reward certain types of behavior, which in this case is pretty obvious: Tumble a lot, follow lots of people, reblog a lot = spend more time on the site = benefit to the company.
4) Social status is an under-studied, under-rated aspect of product design and motivation for user action. This is the subject of my dissertation and I’m seeing increasingly explicit aspects of this in social software (which: yay!).
But let’s not fool ourselves that an algorithmically-generated number “is” social status. I’m sure there are tons of sub-groupings and communities on Tumblr that value different things. I’m sure the top 100 Tumblr users are popular for different reasons. I’m sure there are Tumblr conventions and social mores that mark someone as an insider or outsider, a newbie or a jaded user. There are many good business reasons for the company to boil this down to a single number, but it only tells us a little bit of the overall story. Tumblrites: ideas?
i have a fairly high tumblarity score (at least i think i do – without getting any information on the range of possible scores or how the metric is calculated, it’s hard to tell) and it’s been fluctuating significantly since it was introduced – from 280 to 450. it’s a bit odd to think my behavior in the few days since it was introduced is enough to motivate a swing that big, compared to my behavior in the many many more days i was on tumblr prior to the introduction of tumblarity. this makes me think it’s based primarily on the past week or so of posting, so conceivably someone could significantly change their score quickly.
i have noticed that i like to see the score going up, even though i don’t know what it means. higher must be better, so even though i don’t understand what the metric says about my blog (i’m reblogged/liked often? i post a lot? i post text rather than images? no idea) i still on some level am trying to get the number to go up and stay there. what’s amazing to me is that this effect is happening even without knowing what the score looks at – it seems that if tumblr wanted to motivate specific behavior, they’d be clearer about the meaning of the score.
something i’ve found very interesting is clicking through to the blog rankings and looking at the blogs just above or below me in US rankings. this speaks to what the number doesn’t measure – after a day of posting well-researched, cited, and thought out posts about feminism and torture and such, i found i’d attained the same tumblarity score as “fuck yeah katy perry,” which posts only katy perry pictures. clearly we’re appealing to different audiences, different amounts of time put into the blog, different goals and zero overlapping content. today, i’m equivalent to a recipe-only blog.
i find it extremely annoying that when comparing my tumblr to others, the tumblarity lists only the two immediately above and below me in terms of ranking. i want to know what the top #100 blogs are. i want to compare myself to other blogs with similar content and style. (i’d also like it to be easier to find blogs of similar content and style, but that’s another discussion.)
[...] Quantified Stand-ins for Social Status: Those of you who came by my Blowing up the Brand chat should be interested in this: Interesting thoughts about measurability and social capital from Alice Marwick. [...]
[...] just introduced Tumblarity, an index of your popularity on the site. Alice Marwick posted a really smart take on it, explaining how Tumblarity is a number that stands for social status. What Tumblarity reminds me [...]
Fascinating to think through the implications of all this. If social status can be created via product design, (which you’ve convinced me it can) then it’s a bit scary to think about the next wave of product designers who might sit down and consciously try to “play with” the social status of the masses. Interesting implications for marketers as well, as they could try to “reward” people with social status movement. Hmmmmmm……
Excellent site, keep up the good work
[...] Tumblarity and Quantified Stand-ins for Social Status – Tumblarity is a metric that measures one’s popularity, or degree of Tumblr-ness, depending on who you ask. [...]