Coming out of the IA Summit this year, and following thought-trails down twitter-paths, new friends' blogs etc. It's obvious that design patterns were a huge topic at the Summit. Social design patterns, possibly even more so. Also heard (and stated myself) a couple different times: sharing anti-patterns may be even more critical right now than collecting and cataloguing all the possibilities.
My own talk featured a handful of reputation patterns (coming soon to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library—I promise!) But, if you were listening closely, you probably picked up on a theme. The patterns themselves (Points, Levels, Trophies, Badges, etc) have incredible potential to do harm to your community dynamic. So, taken another way, these patterns can also stand as effective cautionary anti-patterns.
Anyhoo… all of this made me vow (to myself, and now to you) to try and share more after-the-fact analysis, dissection and anti-pattern identification of social media trends. Have you ever noticed how good our industry is at noticing (and praising, and downright trumpeting) “the new” in social media? New product launches get extensive TechCrunch coverage. New Facebook features put the analysts in overdrive. But what about the quiet re-jiggerings? Or outright feature failures?
This, for example, was passed around at work recently. Inside Facebook has noted that FB recently pulled the thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting mechanisms from the News Feed interface. IF notes:
While Facebook has always allowed more general Facebook preferences (like More About These Friends/Less About These Friends), this feedback was much more granular and potentially powerful.
And also:
It's too bad Facebook wasn’t able to get more value out of the explicit preference data users were generating. For now, Facebook will need to rely on more implicit data.
I think
potentially powerful is the key phrase here. What follows is a somewhat-cleaned-up version of my take on the removal.
