Scratch

There's nothing wrong with the friending system, that's the reason why people friend famous people. To get notified when their 'good' projects come out.

I think the problem is more "views", actually. Projects with many views appear in "most viewed",  leading to them getting many more views - the "snowball" effect you described.

This is why views are a really bad measure of quality. It just selects projects that look good,  so that many people have clicked on them and seen them; not projects that people have seen and liked.

cygene wrote:

kayybee wrote:

There's nothing wrong with the friending system, that's the reason why people friend famous people. To get notified when their 'good' projects come out.

Yes, but there are many other people who make good projects that don't become famous. It's not very fair to say that only the famous people make good projects.

I don't think anyone was suggesting that only famous people make good projects...

Its the Scratchers' fault. WE are viewing and loving and remixing, causing it to be on the front page. And I barely see the famous on the front page anymore.

O=={}:::::::>Fallenice<:::::::::{}==O

cygene wrote:

I know there has been posts of this before, but I'm not sure they tackled it the same way I'm about to, so please don't post just to say this is a duplicate. If the mods want to merge this, that's ok.

I'm not sure anyone has realized this yet (some people probably have) but the reason famous people are front paged too much is because many many people have already friended them, and when they make a new project, it gets to the "friends recent projects" section. They view it, love it, remix, etc. and the project then gets to the other front paged sections and even more people view it, etc. Then, the people who view it this time friend them and they get to view it the person's other new projects, and this becomes a snowball (gets bigger and bigger as time goes on). The problem with this, of course, is other people don't get to be famous, as only a few people are friended so much they start the snowball.

There could be several solutions to this:
- completely delete the "friends recent projects" section (but that would stop the people from 1: One the even bigger reason is because when they are front paged, people look at their other projects, too. 2: Because of this, deleting the section would have little effect
- change the friend system - eg: to become friends, both sides have to approve it (but I don't think MIT would allow that since this is a children's site and children don't want to be rejected) As if you aren’t a child. Also, the Scratch team is already thinking of changing the friend system. They made a blog post, and a topic about it.
- let only a few of the people's projects get shown in the friends recent section, and disperse the views for the new projects across different friends, so each project only gets a few views Like I said, they still have access to the user via the front page. This wouldn’t solve the problem
- suggest more solutions 

Last edited by henley (2011-10-27 07:22:39)

we should delete what the community is viewing and what they are remixing because viewing is what people think look good but not necasarily. and remixing because theyve not done anything good.

cygene wrote:

kayybee wrote:

There's nothing wrong with the friending system, that's the reason why people friend famous people. To get notified when their 'good' projects come out.

Yes, but there are many other people who make good projects that don't become famous. It's not very fair to say that only the famous people make good projects.

So what are you going to do, force people to friend random people?

Yesss!!

i hope this will happen soon 

Lightnin wrote:

I thought I"d chime in to say - I agree, this is a real problem. We need to find better ways for people's projects to be "found." One experiment we'll be trying soon is to make the front page "What the community is..." rows show a random selection of the top 10 projects in their category, instead of only the top 3. Hopefully this will spread out the fame at the top a little better - it's a start anyway.

from here

It'll be interesting to see if this recent change will help address some of the concerns being discussed in this thread..

Thanks for starting this discussion, cygene!