Wooden Fish

The talks on Sunday were primarily targeted to developers, so number of attendees greatly reduced, which is kind of nice in a way. As I mentioned in my previous post, I only stayed for half day on Sunday, and only heard the first three talks. Barry and Matt’s talk on Hyper DB and High Performance WordPress was very informative and technical, unfortunately I am not too familiar with the stuff mentioned in the talk, however I can still appreciate the information. I jotted down some notes for future learning.

The talk that I was most interested in was the talk by Rashmi Sinha, the co-founder of SlideShare. She talked about the process of building a massive social system, and also popularity and system managers as trend creator. Obviously, she has put a great deal of thinking and research on these subjects, and her presentation evoked an active Q&A session.

In her talk, she described a problem associated with popularity, which is something that I had in mind during the years of blogging and my participation in various forums. Here is the situation: A user joins an online community and achieves success through a stream of quality content. The user becomes popular, and with the achieved popularity the user also becomes a trend. Even though later on, the user only produced mediocre content and sporadic quality content, however the community already grew accustomed to user’s popularity. This popularity in a way hinders the newcomers or late participants to receive deserved spotlight, and furthermore it prevents innovation within a community. I am not saying it is impossible, but it definitely slows down the process. So as system managers, Rashmi Sinha thinks they are responsible to design a system that strikes a balance.

I think this topic is very interesting and definitely worth further exploration and experimentation. I personally think a community has to discover new voices once a while, and also be able to scout new quality content from newcomers and bring them under the spotlight. In another words, popularity is dynamic and ever-changing rather than fixed. Only such, a community can survive through time and expand its user base consistently.

Check out Rashmi Sinha’s slides hosted on SlideShare.