One thing I’ve dabbled in here on DREWspective is showcasing some of the unsung heroes of the Lego MOCing world: people who’ve created something great, but often don’t get the recognition or praise I feel they deserve. I haven’t done a good job of that recently, and I have found myself veering towards some of the more popular MOCs.

That’s essentially the root problem of things such as featuring and promoting other people, particularly online: there’s a tendency to promote people whom are already popular – whom people already know of – as well as give them added bonuses and perks in some cases.

A classic example is with the site DeviantArt: a site I completely disagree with in terms of its community and hierarchical construct, and one I no longer frequent. But going directly to the site’s home page, you’re shown the score even before you’ve signed up or logged in…

As well as showcasing what’s popular from the get-go, DeviantArt is known for its Daily Deviations: bits of work on the site that get a “seal of approval” from one of the higher-ups, and gets heavily promoted.
To this day I have absolutely no idea how Daily Deviations get chosen, or how someone goes about getting one… but having used the site for quite some time, it’s usually the same kinds of artwork – and usually the same [kinds of] people – who get the Daily Deviation prestige.

One site I do think is worth my time is Bricklink, now that I’ve become engrossed in Lego and MOC designing/building. But they also have a tendency to promote popular stores, as shown below.

While “featured” stores are obviously the ones that sell the most, again I have no idea what qualifies a store for “highlighted” status. I’d suspect that, like with almost anything else, it’s at the discretion of the higher-ups.

I’ve provided two examples of sites I’ve used that put an emphasis on what’s “most popular”, but there are countless sites that do it or something similar. Something’s going through the heads of the people behind these sites, to convince themselves that whatever’s popular deserves even more promotion.

In the case of YouTube, it’s not necessarily the most popular content that gets promoted, but what someone wants to become popular – and in recent times, what people have paid to promote. Although viral videos (such as “I Got Da Burna” by DJChedda727, and who could forget the Bed Intruder song) get their dues, and even the original Chadwarden video received over a million views, YouTube pushes things such as Fred and common/template television shows.

Showcasing only the popular content on a web site has two consequences, both of which I’ll point out for your convenience.

The first consequence is that the “small fry” – the people just starting out, or more likely the actually talented people who’ve been around for a long time but have never been featured – have to work much harder for exposure, with most of them never enjoying much limelight at all. This always raises the question of why a great piece of artwork, a shop with fantastic customer service or a brilliantly produced video never gets the amount of traffic someone feels it deserves – while crap gets promoted several hundred times more frequently. It doesn’t help either when we have professional people and companies posing as amateurs, who shoot up the ranks extremely quickly (something that happens a lot in the Lego, and even the open-source coding communities).
At some point there’s going to be resentment on the content producer’s part, which will often lead them info fading into obscurity – this is mostly why you see so many rude, obnoxious people in a web site’s forums and chat rooms, even for something as innocent as Lego. These people are your know-it-alls, who either couldn’t build a reputation as themselves and got fed up with the politics, or thought that selling out and becoming opinionated was their ticket to fame and fortune.

The second consequence – and this is something particularly common to DeviantArt – is that some people change their styles, and even what they do as a whole, to match those people whose work gets heavily featured. It’s a trap I’ve fallen into myself; I’ve often changed up my style, or started producing things I really wasn’t about, just for the sake of getting a feature or promotion, or even just plain recognition (which never happened anyway).
There are plenty of examples of this happening in online communities. DeviantArt has an endless supply of people creating anthropomorphic (i.e. “furry”) characters, “professional” quality modelling photos and especially manga-style pictures. YouTube has seen a rise in “angry”-style, highly-opinionated, arsey game reviewers since the Angry Video Game Nerd became popular. We’ve already seen how this manifests in online dating and on other sexually-related sites (people copying-and-pasting each other’s content to advertise themselves, and posting the same kinds of photos).

I’ve often asked myself why, in the history of the web, has nobody (or hardly anybody) thought of promoting or featuring lesser-known people. The only time your common or garden person gets any public recognition in most cases is when they first join the web site, and even then it’s as a tiny “newest member” prompt at the bottom of a page. By promoting other people – not just the popular ones – there’s more content to browse, and maybe some of these unsung heroes may get some recognition.

There’s an argument that can be made about people controlling what’s seen by others, by heavily featuring or promoting certain people. It could be stretched further to suggest that people are actively (and covertly) being discouraged to produce their own content, because the featured items are of an insanely high quality. As someone who often doesn’t get promoted or featured myself, sometimes I suspect there being a “good ole boys/girls club” in the background, especially when certain people and certain kinds of work instantly get front-paged. Those arguments are a little beyond the scope of this post; I just wanted to highlight the above consequences.