User-Submitted Content: Cultural Acceleration and Statutes of Limitation
July 13, 2009 :: Joe LoongHere’s another item for the “you kids and your crazy rock and roll music” file: I’ve been interested for a long time is seeing how quickly items achieve “old news” status on social linksharing / social bookmarking sites like Fark and Digg. (See an aggregator site like PopURLs for a dashboard view of more popular social linksharing spots.)
You’ll see bursts of user submission activity around breaking news and memes as they hit the news, other popular Web sites or viral tipping points. Then, after a headlining link bubbles up to a site’s main page or first view (either from being chosen by an editor, or voted up by the community), all of the activity is directed towards that specific item.
Subsequent submissions, unless they bring a distinctly new aspect to the table, are either ignored or dismissed with a terse “Already been posted,” or the even more-succinct “Repeat.”
Eventually, as the event and the discussion plays out, so will activity around the topic peter out. (This may or may not coincide with the item expiring out of the high-traffic first view. The behavior is slightly different on Web message boards, many of which will keep active content popping back up to the first view.)
After this initial phase of activity, the topic passes into the no man’s land of “old news,” inhabited only by the newbs and the clueless who are a little bit behind the curve, and the cognoscenti who take pride in reminding them of this.
Then, a funny thing happens. Because there’s a constant flow of new stuff coming in, the old news is pretty quickly forgotten. (Of course, there are searchable archives, but they’re largely out of mind.) Then, when someone later re-submits the item, there’s a whole new audience of people who missed it the first time around. And when you tell them it’s “already been posted,” they say, “So what?”
It explains why you see items about stuff like exploding whales recur periodically. It’s like that NBC summer rerun slogan from the late ’90s: “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.”
Call it a statue of limitations on user-submissions.
This whole phenomena is not new, of course. There’s a limited amount of space in the public consciousness (at least as what was defined by the particular piece of mass media you’re consuming), always new stuff happening, and always new people to see it. The thing that’s interesting about the online piece is twofold:
1. The cycle is just so much faster. Something can become “old news” in a matter of days (or day), pass out of consciousness in weeks, and become new again (or the focus of “instant nostalgia”) within months.
The focus on “what’s new / what’s hot” that we find so often find online has meant there’s a premium on new-seeking, as opposed to something like retaining institutional memory.
It also means that if you’re a hack like me, you can get a lot of mileage out of rehashing and repackaging your old stuff, even if it’s available in your searchable archives.
2. The phenomena is a lot more transparent – it’s easy to watch the rapid cycling of memes on any social linksharing site where you can see the queue of submitted items. (However, the back half of the cycle, the re-emergence of memes and stories, depends on your memory and search proficiency.)
Anyway, if there’s a takeaway from all this, it’s that you don’t have to be first. Which, now that I think of it, is the re-emergence of one of my earlier-posted themes, You Can’t Be First, But You Can Be Better (remember, if you haven’t seen that one, it’s new to you).
Is any of this applicable to submissions to social linksharing sites (or anything else)? Please leave a comment.
Comments are moderated and will appear shortly. See terms.
