I'm proudly mentioned on the Shadows creator's blog. Andrew didn't have much of a nice thing to say, other than I'm competitive, and my comments were poor quality.
Position Harvesting
I guess it's kind of like spag (spam tags), but different. So you may notice that number 4 on the Shadows Top 5 Tagged Pages list is foobaicom. I actually watched as over a period of three hours more than a dozen new accounts were created and tagged the site. It appears to be some kind of restaurant review site, but since it's in Chinese I can't be entirely certain. Whatever it is, someone involved with it orchestrated a campaign to get in the top 5 list at Shadows.
Now I don't really have a problem with this - I'm all for users tagging anything they want. And it's, in principle, great that a site is encouraging its users to come to Shadows to tag and rate the site. What's a little irritating in this case is that the users never came back, they left poor quality comments, and they generally didn't participate in the community. This is amplified by the fact that Shadows is less then a month a old and doesn't have a huge user base yet, so this kind of "harvesting" of tags to get position is easier. In the future it will be much more difficult.
It is interesting to watch emmergent behaviour around this type of stuff though. For example, our number 1 commentor - IdentityMIA is very competitive - if someone moves up to the number 1 position s/he comes back and comments more stuff. This is almost great. However, the quality of most of the comments is low. Whereas, riddle the #2 commentor has very high quality comments. We'll eventually join these with the user rating mechanism to introduce some means of quality control.
The joys of a new ecosystem!
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. ~Thomas Browne
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