I don’t do this for lurve, but I do think lurve has meaning. I think good answers really do get more lurve, and so it is a sign of the quality of your answers, or of the value other people have gotten out of your answers.
I don’t know if there is anyone who would be doing this if the questions were generated by a machine, and no human being read the answers. I doubt it. I think people do participate in communities for the joy and company of being with people. I also think that there is always a subtle jockeying for status, just as there would be in any group of friends. There’s almost always a first amongst equals—a leader of the group.
I think lurve reflects that, to some degree. It’s a kind of reputation measure.
I would be answering questions on fluther even if there were no lurve. There are other ways of measure your reputation. People’s responses tell you that. Lurve makes it both a little easier and a little harder. Lurve is an imperfect measure, so it becomes difficult to figure out what lurve leaves out. But it is also a quantifiable way of seeing how a person has affected his or her fellow jellies.
It is, however, tricky, because there is also a time effect. The longer you’ve been here, the more lurve you will accumulate. Some people zero themselves out after a while and start a new account from scratch. It is supposedly a protest against the lurve system, but I think it is also a kind of political and psychological statement.
I think many of us prefer a system where status isn’t so apparent. By scuttling your avatar, you are making it very unapparent what your status is. Others who know you will treat you with the respect you earned before. New people who didn’t know you before will be impressed at your respect with such little lurve.
Psychologically, I think there is a bit self-hating going on. Some of us can’t handle the idea that others might like us or find our words to be of value. It doesn’t fit into our self-image. I say this as a person who once did scuttle his persona, although not over the lurve issue per se. It was about respect, however, and I felt disrespected enough to decide I wasn’t worth shit. I was not, at the time, in a good mood. In fact, I was in a dangerously depressed mood.
Anyway, I think we all know the status issues, whether we are willing to admit it to ourselves or not. I don’t believe anyone who says lurve is something they don’t care about. Not even me. I think not caring about lurve is a statement about equality. It is about no one person being any more important that any other. Whether this point is because the person truly believes this, is being cynical about being a person of the people, or is envious of those with a lot of lurve is up to us to decide individually.
Personally, I think equality is important. I think status is important. I hope my words are helpful to people. I look at my own lurve and I see different things. I do see appreciation there, although that is always hard for me to admit. I also see obsession. I put in a lot of time here, precisely because I get some appreciation. But that doesn’t mean that only a few other people provide answers like mine. There are people who have been here a day whose answers I find very valuable. So lurve is one way to assess people here, but in the end, it’s what generates the lurve that is most important: the quality of people’s ideas and the quality of the way they express those ideas.
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