52) Losing Steam

With my recent readings in Newsweek, I came across an article that was so vitally important to the existence of this blog. Your blog. Wikipedia. Twitter.

So begs the question: is social networking a fad waiting to die out?

Many other elements of the user-generated revolution, meanwhile, are beginning to look sluggish. The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.

The article goes on to state that Wikipedia is down on edits, Blogging has withered as a past time, and that 90% of tweets come from only 10% of users.

The possibility is that many people are simply being worn out by all this online sharing and exploring. Inherently, they only go on because other people do it, not because they actually want to contribute. Like any other fad, it grips based on peer pressure.

Or maybe it's because Americans naturally hate responsibilities. This blog started out as a school assignment, and only continues to live because I actually WANT to contribute. For only my own benefit? Perhaps. But none of the classmates whose blogs I follow continue to spew the perspective I crave. They've all gone down.

Then again, it is summer, so maybe we'll see a spark back up when the school year starts. Laziness seems to settle in as a huge factor here. Or as the article so states:

Even the internet is no match for the sloth.

So now, it turns out that many of these sites are turning to bait tactics:

And comment-driven news and aggregation sites like Gawker and The Huffington Post, where part of the fun is reading what the peanut gallery has to say, have decided to show the peanut gallery more love: mostly in the form of badges, stars, and special privileges. Even YouTube has added inducements, giving users the chance to play at Carnegie Hall—with a music contest—and partnering with the Guggenheim Museum to help them show off their art.

So far it seems to be working. After Gawker introduced its Star system, which gave preference to the work of “Starred” commentators, participation on the comment boards rose to a new high. The Huffington Post, which offers its best users digital merit badges and special rights (like the ability to delete other people’s posts), boasts the most active commenters of any news site. And Yelp says it has maintained a pace of a million new reviews every three months.

Such reward programs are only likely to grow more important, especially as the Web reaches into corners of the world where it never benefited from the frisson of a social movement. Last year, in parts of eastern Africa, Google launched the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, an effort to grow the number of Swahili-language Wikipedia entries by tying them to the chance to win modems, cell phones, and a laptop. It worked. This wouldn’t surprise Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Back in 2006, he predicted that the winners in the social-media world would be “those that figure out a formula for making their users feel amply compensated.” Prizes are a start. Can cash be far behind? Oh, right, then it would just be a job.

Are we really that lazy to keep fads running? Well, I guess they're called fads for a reason. Take a look at the internet trend map and tell me how much you recognize.

Live and let die.