Twitter, Whuffie and Digital Feudalism

As SXSW I listened to Tara Hunt present some of her stuff from her book on Whuffie. For the uninitiated, Whuffie is a term used for Social Capital as defined in a Sci Fi novel by Cory Doctorow - Wikipedia:

Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person's Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person's favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

And it all sounds very good - in theory. The problem comes when you look at the very low level of subtlety in systems that measure Digital Social Capital, and the abuses this can entail. It is well known already that a Social Network operates with a Power Law function, and its an interesting term:

On one level, a Power Law is a law for a mathematical term that describes the distribution ratio of some factor to a population. Pareto's 80/20 rule is a typical Power law - 20% of the people do 80% of the work etc. Similarly, in Social Network, 20% of the people have 80% of the followers (in fact it can be even steeper)

On another level, a Power law is just that - those that have the power, have the law. This is seen in social networks as various takes on the endemic "Those Wot Have, Get More" virtuous cycle rule of power laws. In other words, those that start with an advantage will continue to accrue it at a rate out of synch with their actual value added. Ditto, those with none will lose out at a higher rate.

This was really brought home to me today when I read this piece about how Twitter allocates the very limited "Suggested Followers" space at its onramp. Let us assume for example that there are two people of equal social capital within the Twitterverse, but one makes it onto the onramp and the other does not. Within days, the lucky one will have grown their numbers of followers by an order of magnitude. I've watched it over the last few weeks - Guardian, TechCrunch and Mashable were on and saw hundreds of thousands of new followers. The BBC and other equally worthy sites were not, so had much slower growth.

Now imagine if the way of working out one's Social Capital - one's "Whuffie" - was relatively unsophisticated, and looked mainly at the number of followers one had.

Preposterous, I hear you cry! Who would do such a silly thing! There are so many other factors!

And yet this is exactly how most of the current Twitter popularity counters work - they crudely look at number of followers, most don't even adjust for follow/followed ratio (to see who are followtrolls and who have genuine tribes). And in the Twitterverse, the PR engines then use that and compile lists of "Most Influential Twitterers in London" and "Most followed People in Technology". These are then blogged and trumpeted around in the various media channels, so it must be true. And those who have this virtuous circle are then elevated onto the Suggested Followers onramp.

In other words, in a few short steps what was a crude measure has been tranmuted into de facto Whuffie on Twitter. And in a few short months those wot have will gain a lot more, and those wot don't will languish.

So lets just look at the dynamic here:

The Kingmaker (who owns the real estate) can bestow favours (a spot on the suggested follower onramp) to those who are favoured under the system. These lucky people can in turn can then bestow favours on their acolytes (Everybody Follow X, he/she is AWESOME) and the whole system is amplified by the Heralds of Whuffie, those blogs and lists that amplify the rankings.

Upset the person above you and your plug is pulled, you are out the Whuffie Creation Virtuous circle, and over time you will decline as others more favoured shoot past

Now this is nothing short of Digital Feudalism.

To explain - Feudalism being where the King owns the real estate, and hands pieces of it for Lords to manage, and they hand it on to the various followers, all of whom aggregate the value add of the peasants at the bottom for their own benefit. Digital Feudalism does the same, but harvests attention rather than agriculture.

But, I hear you say, Feudalism required the peasants to stay on the land and in their place, and Religion taught them to be happy with their lot.

Ah, but the Social Media Zeitgeist is forever preaching that in the digital world one is free, one has influence, one can find one's own heaven. Follow Me and all will be perfect in this most perfect of all virtual worlds. And in reality, if all your friends are using the service to socialise, you are pretty much locked in anyway.

And now imagine your whole digital life worked like this, that this Whuffie drove your status in the pecking order in all things, i.e. all your interactions were built into these sorts of systems, so you couldn't get out. Imagine too what would happen if you protested, went against the popular grain - all the behavioural psychology in the world so far shows that the crowd would not praise you for your wisdom, but pillory you instead.

Welcome to WhuffieWorld........

(My point is not that Tara's book is saying this - it is a good first step into the debate on Social Capital. But this is all still a first step. Without a lot of the work that has gone into putting the checks and balances into our real world systems in the last 1,000 years or so, then Whuffie based online systems - at least as currently imagined - are a sure fire recipe for creating something like Digital Feudalism)