Twitter litter
The problem with all of the “we're tracking the most popular links on Twitter” sites is that link sharing on Twitter depends on (in order of decreasing relevance): — 1. the time it takes to read/view the link (shorter is way better) — 2. if the subject of the link is Twitter or Facebook
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2009 the question of what Twitter links are actually worth had been running for months: Search Engine Land asked in March whether Twitter was 'incredibly valuable or utterly useless' for link building, and ReadWriteWeb followed in May with the argument that Twitter would not index the links users share at all (the link-building debate) (the indexing question). Meanwhile Silicon Alley Inspector-style coverage catalogued the winners of the traffic surge — the sites benefiting most from Twitter's traffic explosion — many of them exactly the link-tracking leaderboards Kottke now pokes at.
His complaint lands in the middle of the Twitter–Facebook collision of June 2009: Facebook's new publisher defaults toward public 'everyone' sharing, explicitly taking aim at Twitter, so Facebook-related links are flooding the stream just as Twitter itself has become globally prominent via the Iran post-election coverage. A leaderboard built on raw retweet/share counts will, by Kottke's logic, rank that self-referential flood highest.
First-order effects
- The link-tracking leaderboard sites riding Twitter's traffic wave face a credibility problem: their rankings systematically favor short content and anything about Twitter or Facebook, meaning their 'most popular' lists measure consumption friction and platform narcissism as much as genuine interest.
- Publishers watching those boards get a perverse optimization target — cut content length and write about the platforms themselves to climb the charts, independent of actual reader value.
Second-order effects
- Marketers and site owners who bought traffic or validation off these leaderboards misread demand, pushing budget toward snackable, meta content and away from long-form pieces that share slowly but deeply.
- As Facebook pushes its own public-status publisher, more cross-platform chatter flows through the stream, further inflating the Twitter-and-Facebook topic share and making the trackers' bias worse — competitors in the measurement space have an opening to sell engagement- or click-weighted alternatives instead of raw share counts.
Third-order effects
- If raw share counts stay the industry's default currency while being demonstrably skewed, trust migrates from public leaderboards toward click-through and conversion measurement — an early crack in the idea that visible sharing activity equals influence.
- The episode feeds a broader 2009 argument over whether social platforms should even expose link metrics, since unindexed, unmeasured sharing (per ReadWriteWeb) makes any third-party ranking an approximation rather than a record.
The trend: Social media measurement in 2009 is colliding with its own incentive distortions, pushing analytics away from raw share-count leaderboards toward engagement-weighted metrics.