Sphinn Popularity Contest

Social media is a popularity contest. A study of UTube and Digg has shown that the popularity of a post or video depends on the number of votes it get early on in its life. This should come as no surprise to anyone that uses Sphinn. Articles gain importance from the number of Sphinn they can achieve.  On Sphinn I can see there are two reasons for this:

i) A variation on the filthy-linking-rich theory – that posts with Sphinns find it much easier to get Sphinns. These sites will be ranked higher and receive greater exposure giving them more opportunity to get links. There is also a psycological reason where people will preferentially give votes to stories that already have votes. When scanning the articles in social media sites like Digg and Sphinn, your attention is drawn to stories that have a large number of votes. Your curiosity is aroused by the fact there may be something useful if other people have voted. You don’t want to waste your time reading something that everyone else has passed by. It is the ‘me-to’ mentality. Interestingly on Sphinn you can see who Sphunn your story. Over time you get to know who are the influential people. If they have voted for a story this could also encourage a Sphinn out of you.

ii) The time available to collect links is limited by people adding new posts. People scanning the stories are unlikely to go more than one or two pages deep, especially if they are frequent visitors to the site.

It is important then for an article to build up link momentum in the early stages. i) to maximise the time available to collect links and to persuade people to read the article in the first place. Another important factor is the time of day. If it is out of step with the majority of users timezone, the post will have move down the list before many people have seen it.