Social Websites As Games - How to Win at Digg, YouTube, Facebook
In a comment on our recent post The Digg Effect, C. Weng pointed to an e-book he has written called The Web: Hidden Games. It is available for free on Lulu.com. Weng commented that his book reveals "how websites such as Digg …
Context & Ripple Effects
Weng's e-book is the second playbook-style treatment of social media in as many months: Search Engine Land's Social Media Manual framed participation as rule-bound play just weeks earlier, following Computerworld's roundup of simple Web hacks in August and CNET's December 2006 look at the big Digg rig. What is new here is the framing itself — not tips for playing social sites, but a claim that Digg, YouTube, and Facebook ARE games.
That claim lands at an awkward moment for the biggest player named. Facebook spent early December apologizing for Beacon, admitting mistakes in both its construction and its PR handling while criticism mounted, and more than 1,500 users were caught placing ads on their own profile pages against site rules — evidence that users already treat platform constraints as things to be gamed.
First-order effects
- Readers gain a free, codified strategy manual for Digg, YouTube, and Facebook, turning what was scattered folk knowledge among top users — the behavior CNET documented with the big Digg rig — into an explicit doctrine anyone can download.
- The named platforms face a published attack surface: once winning strategies for voting, ranking, and visibility are written down, Digg's submission queue and Facebook's profile rules become targets for coordinated play rather than organic participation.
Second-order effects
- Platforms are pushed toward algorithmic countermeasures and stricter enforcement, and Digg's September move deeper into social networking widens the field — every new social feature adds surface area that gamers can exploit, forcing design and moderation to chase the manual.
- Facebook's Beacon debacle demonstrates the mirror image: when the PLATFORM plays moves on users' behalf without consent, the backlash forces retraction, so both sides of the game — user gaming the rules, platform breaking them — now carry visible costs.
Third-order effects
- If analysts and users alike keep describing these sites in game terms, expect platforms to formalize the mechanics deliberately — points, ranks, visible status — turning community management into game balancing, with moderators cast as referees against meta-gamers.
- Openness becomes the contested resource underneath it all: Weng praises Facebook's August decision to open messaging to normal email addresses as a small change with big impact, but the gap between nominally open features and ones users can actually bend to their advantage — and the rules policed against that bending — becomes the central design problem.
The trend: Social media is consolidating into explicit game structures, locking platforms and their most strategic users into a standing contest over who writes — and who bends — the rules.