A Sphinn User's Opinion about Gaming Sphinn

As it's well known, Digg, Youtube and many other social sites are "gamed" by marketers looking to drive traffic from those sites, or gain rankings on Google. However, many people resent when search marketers try to "game" a search marketing social site - a la sphinn - and take some strong steps to encourage "good behavior".


Karl Ribas posted an interesting article about the wrongfulness of gaming the Sphinn system. He feels that good content will get there by itself. Below is my own opinion.

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% about not "gaming the system". Every system is there to be played. Politics, business, search marketing you name it. Everyone wants to be top dog - or be the expert, listened, be able to rant, generate "engagement", whatever the metric.

The goal of sphinn is to get relevant information to the right people. As people that are involved in SMO, we all know that the more we have connections / relationships / links / authority from other people in our industry, the more we can do.

While I can't sell my search marketing services to a search marketer, I can refer an SEM client, if I only do SEO. Or he can license my software, I can learn his technique regarding Log analysis, subscribe to his feed, get a reference and so much more.

The best way to gain credibility is to get a referral from someone else. I see nothing wrong with "gaming the system", as long as the product / information you are providing actually provides value to the end user.

(If my goal was to gain more friends to game the system, I just messed myself over!)

I do believe that Karl probably wouldn't argue with most of this. It's more a matter of a bunch of idiots that don't know how to provide valuable articles to sphinn, and would rather spam a tech savvy audience (idiots).