Social Scoreboards are the Modern Page Counters

In the early days of weaving together the social web, we had to make our own link tags to connect things. Open bracket a href equals quote link unquote close bracket. We also had to walk to school up hill both ways in the snow, but never mind about that. As things progressed, we ended up with cute little embedded buttons to post a link to something to FaceBook and Twitter and to flip bits on Reddit or Digg. This made things easier for normal people to link things up at the expense of some visual bric-a-brac. Useful, even if a bit ugly when not done with care.

Then, as the various social network APIs continued to evolve, something horrific happened. All that ugly but somewhat useful bric-a-brac has been turned into a scoreboard that’s now attached pages and posts all over the place. Worse, it seems that many sites are using the biggest possible versions of these widgets so that you can’t miss ’em. The graphic above is an 100% crop from a site I’ll leave nameless.

Sure, it’s nifty that the tech exists that let’s you tap or click a button on a website and have a number update to indicate that your vote has been tallied. It was fun the first twenty times. Months later, however, I have to say that I’m not into it any more. In fact, I’m not really sure who those scores are really for. Am I supposed to be impressed that 9 people +1’d your page? Or 90K liked your post on FaceBook? Or, should I feel sorry for you that nobody Dugg your site?

Truth is, I don’t care about any of that. I shouldn’t care about any of it. If I want to favorite or share your page, I’m going to do so on the merits of the content. I’m going to do so for all the same reasons that Anil Dash does when favorites stuff.

You know what these huge-ass scoreboards make me think of? They remind me—both in motivation as well as basic design—of those dorktastic page counters from the mid-nineties that those of us online at the time played with momentarily because, well, everyone else was.