Re: Bubbles, upvotes, web interlinking

Responding to two good posts I found this week: Brennan’s Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!, which linked me to Coyote’s Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems. Because I’m a proper smoothbrain, I never realized what the “bubbles” of bubbles.town refers to. The site’s footer currently reads, “Good stuff bubbles up.” As in, the “good” blog posts are made discoverable via upvotes. Boy do I disagree. Using upvotes as a signal for “better” does not resonate with me at all. I’ve beaten around this bush in some of my earlier posts, but the ones linked above get right into it. Re: convergence Coyote and Brennan give admirable treatment to some of the problems with upvote-driven trending lists. One of them is what Coyote calls the problem of convergence. In other words, posts in these lists tend to talk about the same shit. I assume that some of that convergence is due to well-intentioned bloggers each independently coming to similar insights and conclusions. I have no problem…