MIDDLEBURGH

Middleburgh Last Quarter

The game continues... A few weeks ago I was contemplating withdrawing from playing "IMGUR" and moving on to explore new challenges, but the Chinese Thought Police insisted on playing "down vote" with me.

This is where I post an image about umbrellas, demonstrators or establishment figures(with a "flattering" comment) on IMGUR and they, hunting as a pack, run it to ground and down vote it into oblivion( driving the score to -10 to get it automatically pulled) so that no one using IMGUR might see anything supportive of HK protesters. The fastest they achieved was about 7 minutes (post to gone) and about 400 views. This is actually not very impressive. The image,left, which was posted with title "Hogworts: Generation 2" was "as if by magic" pulled down with net score of -13 votes in less than 4 seconds (ie gone between submiting the image and flicking the screen to view it (1 screen refresh) The Party should review the performance targets it has set it's 50 cent posters - Allegedly it pays 50cents for each posting/scoring action on westerm social media sites, to either push the official line or counter any contrary view - clearly not getting it's monies worth!!

Anyway whilst we (the Chinese and I) were sparring, I finessed my work flow for sourcing, qualifying and posting images to IMGUR (I do process re-engineering in real world .....) .At the same time IMGUR upgraded GIF processing and a bot started to cross post my images. These changes meant that the view rate targets I had originally set myself were invalid (and understated). Effectively it had become a two tier system (GIF/static images) which frankly took the fun out of playing. At that time I was on about 1.3K points ie a mid range poster and I realised that it might not be a big deal to push for a user rating of 6K points (which would put me in top quartile of "posters". Now I personally don't give a rat's turd about how well esteemed I am on IMGUR but I am "competitive" and up for a challenge Under these circumstances I decided to realigned my objectives and tasked myself to get to a user rating of 6K by end of October 2014.

As of this morning (slightly ahead of target ) I have met and exceeded this objective. At time of setting the target I did consider follow on options eg 6K is midway in the "Idolized" band (4K -8K) so the thought was I could then (if motivated) go for 8K+ and get in the "Renowned" band (8K-20K) but, so my reasoning went, 8K is such a naff number that if i could get to 8K (which in Chinese mythology can be associated with "double death") I should go for 10K+ (a much more "well rounded" target) . In the event I blew it ..

One of my earliest posts (Sept 28th 2014) had gone viral getting 0.5M views but only a score of only 60points (compare this to image with the most recent highest score 254 points/20Kviews) . Based on the totality of my posting experience my plan was to post daily a limited group (minimum effort on my part) of "high quality" images with intent of getting a daily total incremental score of about 200-250 points to build my score. I had just started running into problems about maximum number of images on display (225 image cap) and I had no expectation of getting another viral image (although there were a couple which got 100K views) or any images with more that 250 points.

However, in yesterdays batch, there was a gif similar in nature to the previous .5M GIF ie a discrete attractive asian woman who does something unexpected and funny. Since last night its sailed past 0.5M views on its way to 0.66M+? and has 5.5K+ score (still counting) . It has pushed my rating to 12K+ which means I either quit (since I am over above 10K), or focus on some niche objectives ie only post "quality" non GIFs etc for edification of masses, or lots of provocative bums and tits to piss people off , or go for bust and try to get into the "Glorious " band (20K+).

The situation is now under review...... ehm ....I have a backlog of images to post .......

Labels: IMGUR, PROTESTS

Posted at 10/26/2014 05:18:00 pm by David Middleburgh   Permalink

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