a1-fan-fun

- Is it only me, or is Sphinn a relatively closed community? Whenever I visit it, I see that most hot topics have been submitted by the same small group of users. I know Sphinn is certainly not as huge as, say, Digg; this might partially justify the lack of variation. Still I wonder how the apparent dominance of a few members could discourage the participation of newcomers?

- That inevitably leads me to other questions: why do sphinners tend to preferably sphinn posts submitted by popular members? Could it be the infamous bandwagon effect? Of course it happens on other social media sites, but on Sphinn it is… well, more visible.

- Once I was the first person to sphinn a certain post and then I saw a popular member regreting it that he wasn’t the first one, implying that the article would hardly go hot, despite its quality. Guess what? He was right. Interesting, huh?

- When will Sphinn make the Category Feeds available? WHEN?!

- By the way, try subscribing to the New Topics Feed if you feel that things are just too quiet on your feed reader. Trust me: the Hot Topics Feed won’t do it. Go for the whole lot. You’ll not only find some hidden gems that will never go hot, but also have an amazing source of research and inspiration right before your eyes.

This is my entry for Simonne’s group writing project on Sphinn.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under A Visitor's Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.