Vinyl & Data

What I like about working with the Discogs data is to make data that isn't visible visible. In an earlier post I talked about that I suspected that the Discogs contributor ranking likely followed the 80/20 rule , but I didn't have enough data yet to confirm that. I crawled more data from Discogs (very slowly, as Discogs doesn't make it easy with their anti-crawling measure, so I crawled from multiple locations over quite a few hours) and reran scripts that I wrote to crunch the numbers and see how many of the top contributors were responsible for having 80% of the accumulated points in Discogs. When looking at contributions of the top 1000 contributors 60% of the contributors accounted for about 80% of the points. The more data I got the more this moved towards 20% and it became clear very quickly that Discogs indeed seems to follow the 80/20 rule: when looking at the points of the top 36,000 contributors 80% of the points accumulated belong to the top 21.3% contributo...

In Discogs you can get points for every contribution. There are a few people who have made it a sport to score as many points as possible, the so called "rank hunters" which some people look down on for reasons that I do not understand (in case you want to be a rankhunter or you want to be a more effective one, please check out the "Unofficial Discogs rankhunting guide" to maximize your efforts). It works like this: adding a new release gets you three points and each edit (regardless how much you edit) gives you one point and there is some sort of leaderboard/ranking for all contributing users to Discogs . There are a few people that have an enormous amount of points and who seem to live for the site. The number one currently has over 356,000 points. When looking at the graphs they really reminded me of power laws , and the 80/20 rule because when looking at the first page of the contributors in Discogs and power law pictures there is a striking resemblance so...

One fascinating side to Discogs is the interaction with other people. As you are probably aware the whole database is crowdsourced, with people adding and improving (at least, that's the idea) data. At the moment I am writing this there are 388,098 users listed in the contributor ranking, meaning they contributed to one or more releases. That's a lot of people: taken together they would be the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, before Utrecht . This also means that you might meet a wide range of characters, from many different cultures, with different motivations, and different opinions about what is the correct behaviour on Discogs. One of my friends is doing a lot of janitor work on Discogs and he gets to see quite a few comments from friendly to annoyed, very angry, hostile, or even downright absurd. Luckily my friend has been hardened by years of online disputes and, as the saying goes: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!" so if th...

After a friend who helps a lot on Discogs got accused of making minor edits just to get more votes I felt that something really important was missing, namely an unofficial "rankhunting guide" for Discogs. So here it is! In this article you will find some best practices for increasing your rank on Discogs, without pissing off everyone. With the advise here and too much free time on your hands it should be easy to get into the top 1000 in no time. Use scripts to discover problematic entries First you need to have a list of entries you want to fix, as it is much more efficient and you can very easily click your way through entries. The easiest way to do this is to download a monthly dump of the releases in Discogs and then run scripts that will output a list of smells that need to be fixed.  Spread your "risk" These scripts output a list of smells in the same order as in which the releases were added to Discogs. Because every ten seconds or so a new release ...

At Discogs every edit you make scores points: adding a new entry is 3 points and editing an entry, or adding one or more pictures is worth 1 point. Users are ranked according to the number of points they have. Some users have more than 100,000 points with a very select few significantly more than that . Scoring points is a good example of gamification , where you try to get users to do perform a certain action and reward them for it. In this case it is about adding new releases or improving existing releases and the reward is points. To get more points can make some people feel good: you get immediate feedback after making a commit (more points) and you can see that you are making progress to a higher ranking. This positive feedback loop has been well researched. What Discogs could do more...and should they? At the moment Discogs is not really promoting the contributor ranking. The question is whether or not this should be changed. On the upside it could mean that people mig...