At the DelveNYC conference a few weeks ago, I saw Joshua Porter give a great presentation called Designing for Social Traction, the slides for which are now available on Slideshare. (I was also lucky enough to win a copy of Josh’s book.)

A few fun things from Josh’s talk:

1) The article Eager Sellers Stony Buyers by John T. Gourville, which explains that buyers tend to overvalue the products they currently use by a factor of three and sellers tend to overvalue the things they make by a factor of three, leading to a 9x differential between the two.

2) The case of Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s #1 ranked reviewer until 24 October 2008, when she dropped to #445 because Amazon shifted its algorithm to rank reviewers by helpfulness (quality) not proflicacy (quantity). There’s also some question as to whether Klausner was even writing her own reviews. Josh explains.

3) The teaching of Peter Kollock, particularly his famous Stanford lecture, which says that people contribute online for four reasons: reputation, reciprocity, doing good work, and for attachment/need of a group.

4) The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are nine conditions for flow, which starts with having clear goals and concludes with finding a balance between skills and challenges. If something’s too easy we get bored. If it’s too difficult, we feel anxious. Flow happens when the skills of a user and the challenges of a task meet in an ever-evolving middle ground.