How do you get a bunch of points?

[Larry Sanger]

New addition to the FAQ (follow-up e.g. with more questions on Infobitt-talk):

How do I get a bunch of points?

Add big new stories before anybody else. Or just work a lot.

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There are two approaches to getting a lot of points: the smart way, and the hard way.

The smart way is to add important new stories as soon as they break. The secret is to find stories that will rank highly before anybody else does. You get big bonuses for high-ranking bitts.

How do you do that? First, ideally but not strictly necessarily, you'd review what Infobitt's Top Stories are as well as the highest-ranked among the bitts that didn't make Top Stories (the lightest blue-colored ones). A good way to do this is to go ahead and rank the present Top Stories yourself and then rank at least 10 more of the highest-ranked bitts. Please rank any white-background bitts if you seem them, because there can be "hidden gems" there. The point of all this is just to make it easier to spot what really is "breaking news" for Infobitt.

Second, scan your favorite news feeds. There are many newsreaders that can help with this. Google News works as well. Look for important, big new stories that (to your knowledge) Infobitt hasn't covered yet.

Third, search Infobitt for one or two basic keywords that would definitely appear in a bitt about the story, if we had one. If we haven't already covered the latest developments, you're good to go: make the bitt! Make a great bitt about an important story, and we will love you!

Then watch as your bitt sticks in the top 10 through to the next edition, and maybe the top three. Our highest-ranked contributors do this a lot.

The hard way is to make a whole bunch of bitts willy-nilly based on whatever seems good at the time. This is OK if most of your bitts aren't really serious Top Stories candidates. (Note, we do have a "limit yourself to five" rule for serious Top Stories candidates. See another FAQ item about that.) And just work a lot ranking Top Stories and various categories, adding facts to other bitts and your own, etc. You're rewarded for everything.

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Reminder: I count six new unranked bitts in Unranked from the last hour, thanks to Adam and Eugene. That's too long to remain in unranked, and too many to remain in unranked...please, rank all new incoming bitts as you see them. Someone asked me, "Does this mean putting them in the pool?" The answer: absolutely yes. If a bitt is not worthy of being in the pool, then mercilessly drop it into the pool. Throw it kicking and screaming into the deep end. Seriously, that's important information the system needs in order to work properly. And just one person ranking a bitt is not enough. Three should give us a decent approximation of how deeply into the pool it should go, or whether it's actually near the top ten.

By the way, does this mean that you should pool your own bitts in the Top Stories pool, even if you're just working on a category? Absolutely yes. Please pool your own bitts. I do that myself every so often.

--Larry

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Larry Sanger

Founder/CEO, Infobitt.com