This Community is Not a Competition

(I guess this post could be subtitled: What's Working For Me: Having Really Strong Opinions About Things That Probably Don't Matter)

A few days ago, I got an email from Circle of Moms [who? Exactly.] telling me that I had been nominated for their Top 25 Adoption Blogs for 2012. And I groaned and thought oh no. 

I was nominated last year, although I didn't really get involved because of my deep seated fear of rejection, and the whole thing was a disaster. People get very wound up about this sort of thing and it's not fun to be part of and it's not fun to watch.  Social media is already far, far too quantitative. Everything is about the numbers. It's already too easy to judge ourselves by how many people follow us, how many people 'like' what we say on facebook, how many times your  your witty analysis of the latest Kardashian divorce is retweeted.  It always feels like a popularity contest. 

And this 'Top 25' stuff isn't even a veiled or implicity popularity contest - it's an actual popularity contest. What kind of  a sick idea is that? Surely the whole point of blogging is connection.  How is that going to make us feel more connected to each other? It's not, that's what.  But then, it's not really about us, is it? It's about money. 

Here's the idea - they nominate you, or you nominate yourself, and then you ask everyone you know to vote for you. You can vote every day. 

Gaaaaaah. Any competition that says you can vote every day is totally and utterly bogus. Competitions like this are not about promoting understanding about adoption, or of connecting mothers with each other, or even about curating a list of useful adoption writing. Vote-every-day competitions are about one thing only: increasing traffic to the host website.  Which makes sense, I guess: they are not in the business of educating people, or of increasing awareness about the complexities surrounding adoption. They are in the business of making money. They want advertising. To get advertising, they need traffic. Specifically, they want our traffic, traffic from the adoption community as we vote for our favourites and try to pretend that we don't care how many people are voting for us.  They want our traffic.  Next month, I guess it will be traffic generated by competition for the Top 25 Moms Who Live On A Farm, or Top 25 Moms Who Drive A Prius, but this month it's us and it annoys me I am going to use my own little space to say that I Do Not Like It. 

I don't know anything about the people involved in this website, and I have nothing against them personally. But I don't like what they are trying to do - they are trying to use the community that WE have created, together with our our pathetic need for constant validation

to drive up their own advertising revenues.  That just seems unbearably cynical to me. 

I guess the payoff is supposed to be that, if you make the top 25 list, you get the benefit of a link to you from their website.  Aaaaaaand... who cares? It's not BlogHer, people, it's not CNN. Personally, I had never heard of Circle of Moms until they ran the Top 25 thing last year and then I pretty much forgot about them until I got an email about it again this year. 

I do not think that popularity contests promote a sense of community. I resent that a group of people who are not part of this community would crash in here and ask us to annoy each other by spending four weeks shilling for votes, then assess our self worth by how many we get. What's in it for us? Nothing, that's what. 

So, I'm boycotting the whole thing. I won't be voting for you, and I don't want you to vote for me. 

That was all I was going to say. 

And then, this happened, because I obviously needed another reason to be annoyed about the whole thing. In short, the Circle of Moms team decided that Cassi, one of the first mothers on the list, wasn't positive enough about adoption, and they unceremoniously removed her from the competition. This is, of course, pretty eye-watering. Seriously, people? Seriously? Cassi has some difficult stuff to say about adoption coercion, but I think that if any of us had been through what she had been through, we would have some difficult stuff to say about that too. On one level, I'm shocked. 

But on another level, I'm not shocked at all. This decision is entirely consistent with the fact that they are trying to make money from advertising revenue.  Having a blog like Cassi's front and centre is probably not a very revenue-friendly thing. 

Some people have concluded that the best way to react to this is to vote as often as possible for the other people who are telling the more complex story of adoption - particularly other first mothers and adopted adults

With respect, I disagree. Making a point of visiting frequently in order to vote for the complicated stories pretty much just gives them exactly what they want.What Circle of Moms needs and wants is traffic. They want our clicks.  I say - don't give it to them.  Spiking their traffic is hardly going to punish them for censorship. If you don't like what they're doing, don't link to them. (There are no links to them in this post, obviously). Don't visit their site.  Send the organisers an email, if you want to, and then move on. Whether because of the cynicism or the censorship, I don't want to be part of this whole thing, and I recommend that you aren't, either. 

Okay, off my soapbox. 

And now, because all that was very negative, please enjoy this picture of my son meeting a chicken.