Award and comments groups

There are a lot of variants mixing both principles. Like '4 Aces' where you are have to comment the next to yours and 3 others you can choose freely. Sometimes it's wanted that you choose pictures from different pages in the pool.

Also lot's of groups are topic related, like the 'Pritzker Price' for architecture shots or the 'Fav 1-2-3' groups, where you need a certain number of favs to post your picture.

Like in the latter one giving comments is sometimes accompanied by giving faves.

Also the groups vary in pure text comments and comments plus some group icon. As a rough rule one can say that the classic groups have no icons, the newer ones have.

• The award groups are following a completely different idea. Only after getting an award the user is allowed to post his picture. After that there are again to subtypes:

• First type means just posting the picture and the job is done, like in classic groups as 'A big fav'. So in the end the gain for the poster is rather low. Normally he get just one comment. It's hard to guess how many people are going afterwards through the pool and give a comment or fav. Nevertheless you will in general find highly popular shots in this groups.
• There are also award groups where the comments are mandatory. 'Natures Finest' is such a group. In principle your pictures will get more comments than in the other groups, but practically this is often not the case. People seem not to follow as strictly the rules as in the comment groups.

In principle all award groups combine the invitation with some kind of icon which varies in size in between the groups, sometimes you have the choice between icons of different size. In general there is a trend for the more ambiguous groups to reduce the size of their icons in the tame. Maybe caused by the protest of some users.

The award groups are more homogeneous in than the comment groups, mostly they differentiate only by the topic of the group, like nature, portraits, bw and so on. The classic groups like 'The best:Bravo' or 'A big fav' are open for any type of images.

There also some exotic type of groups, like 'challenge you' where you got an award for winning a internal photo contest. Only the winner can put the picture into the pool.

One special award group is 'Magic donkey'. Here you need in addition 5 awards from different groups in advance.

Maybe this list is not complete, but I think I got the main types of comment and award groups.Of course there also some mixtures of both types. For example 'Super hearts' where you get an invitation for having more than 10 comments in the 'flickr hearts' group. Than you have comments group where you can also give invitations awards to pictures not in the pool, but everyone can also post pictures without awards to the pool and the comment on pictures inside.

The important point is now how far lead this type of groups to a boost of popularity the picture would normally not deserve. Cause that's the point when people say this groups exist to game explore or just exists to gather attention.

So lets discuss the gaming potential of comments and awards groups. I think that it should be obvious for every one that the gaming potential of award groups as defined above is almost zero. On average you get just one comment. That's not an effective way to enter explore. In addition you can not influence to get an award. So you depend on the taste of the people looking at your pictures.

My experience with those award shows, that getting awards is the result of being already popular or in explore. Cause only if a hugh amount of people is looking at your pictures, you have the chance to get one, cause simply not many people are giving awards. Mostly award winning pictures are already found on explore or are posted by people with a large number of contacts.

So the gaming and attention seeking aspect is neglect able for award groups.

Now have a look at comment groups. And start with the first type, where the commented pictures are freely used. Statistically each picture will get as many comments as every poster should give. So one for the 'World through my eyes', two for the '1-2-3' type groups and five in a group like 'flickr hearts'. But that's theory. Practically the number of comments is not equally distributed. The unpopular pictures get less comments, the popular pictures get more. And here, and that's the important point, popular doesn't mean popular only inside the group, it means popular everywhere. So pictures with a lot of 'flickr heart' comments will have also lot's of other comments, pictures with no other comments will also fail in such a comment group. What doesn't that mean for the gaming potential? Of course it's higher than in the award groups, but inmost cases the pictures would have entered explore anyway, cause of it's general popularity. So sometimes indeed, such a group can give the final kick, so that it will enter explore, but anyway it gets a lot of attention.

And the other comment groups? Yes, they have some gaming potential. Cause every picture, good or bad, popular or unpopular, will get the same amount of comments. So if I post crap, it will get the same as a great picture. So maybe this could be sufficient for entering explore. But one have to keep in mind that such groups are punished since last year by flickr. So the gaming effect is effectively zero know.

So that's my analysis and,of course subjective, point of view about comment and award groups based on observation and own experience with this kind of groups. I have participated at all kind of groups, but on award groups only passively, cause I'm just to lazy to copy the award html before giving a comment. Anyway I prefer for the sam reason to giv favs than comments cause it's easier. If I got an award, it depends on th egroup if post or not. In principle I only post to the old award groups, 'a big fav', 'my winner' or so.

Concerning comments group I participate mostly in the free choose groups, cause I don't like to comment picture I don't like. But this groups are comparable new, so before I joined also the other ones. Lately I reduced my participation in any kind of comment groups. I don't know really why, maybe it has started to get boring. Sometimes I use them for experiments, comparing the number of comments of popular and unpopular of my pictures can get. The result is rather clear. As I described before, the already popular ones get always more comments. On a regular basis I post to '1-2-3 favs' groups, just because I made the experience that I can find lots of pictures I like in this groups. The gain of comments or faves is not the point. Two more faves for a pictures having already one hundred doesn't matter a lot...

I will not finally speculate about the origin why some people dislike this groups so heavily while on the other hand a large group seems to like this concepts of awards and comments a lot. I think in general behavior of people in the Internet, especially in the Web2.0 community pages is often very emotional and not very rational. Loving and hating things is often pronounced very drastically, so it seems in this case...

Sorry for writing as much, but I thought some clarification and definition might be useful for discsussion.